Emile Duhousset

M. le Commandant; Colonel Emile Duhousset
File:Duhousset, Emile.jpg
Born	1823
Residence	Atlas [1865] 6 Rue de Furstemberg, Paris [1899]
Occupation	armed services
Society Membership membership ASL, AI Corresponding Member elected_ASL 1864.02.16

Notes

House Notes

Colonel
French army

Notes From Elsewhere

Louis Emile Duhousset, a French artist and army officer. 
L. E. Duhousset was born in April 18, 1823. He attended military school and joined the army. As an officer, he was sent to Iran in 1858, when Naser-al-Din Shah requested the French government to send a group to instruct the Persian army based on French standards. Since Duhousset was very interested in anthropology and human ethnicity, he prepared more than 600 drawings of people from different provinces on their way to Tehran. A year later he traveled to Isfahan, Shiraz, Kerman, Baluchistan, and Khurasan and studied ethnic groups such as the Lour, Bakhtiyari, Balouch, Armenians, and Turkamen. He provided hundreds of fast sketches in pen and ink, and watercolor drawings of soldiers and their weapons, men and women from different ethnicities, the monarch Naser-al-Din Shah and his courtiers, attendants, servants, holy shrines, bridges, mountains, lakes, cities, and gates of the cities. He left Iran after three years. His drawings impressed Napoleon III and Eugenie, the empress, deeply. In 1863, his works were exhibited at the Science Academy. The French Ministry of Education printed his drawings in a book.4 His human figures contain accurate details of the costumes and characteristics of the sitters identifying them as to their rank, position, gender, and ethnicity. Duhousset visited the court of Naser-al-Din Shah and provided at least two sketches of the shah, in one of which the monarch himself is drawing Duhousset.5 These drawings suggest that the shah, some of the princes, and probably the royal artists of the time were introduced to Duhousset’s technique. Moreover, the artist was one of the educators in the military department of the Dar-al-Fonoun School, and there is a good chance that he shared some of his works and techniques with the art teachers and even the students (see figure 1).

Publications

External Publications

The gaits, exterior and proportions of the horse / By E. Duhousset