Jean-Léon Gérôme

Jean-Léon Gérôme (11 May 1824 – 10 January 1904) was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as academicism.

In 1840 he was sent to Paris at the age of 16 where he studied under Paul Delaroche, whom he later accompanied to Italy in 1843.

He visited Florence, Rome, the Vatican and Pompeii.

On his return to Paris in 1844, like many students of Delaroche, he joined the atelier of Charles Gleyre and studied there for a brief time.

He then attended the École des Beaux-Arts.

In 1846 he tried to enter the prestigious Prix de Rome, but failed in the final stage because his figure drawing was inadequate.

His painting The Cock Fight (1846) is an academic exercise depicting a nude young man and a very thinly draped young woman with two fighting cocks, with the Bay of Naples in the background.

He sent this painting to the Paris Salon of 1847, where it gained him a third-class medal.

This work was seen as the epitome of the Neo-Grec movement that had formed out of Gleyre's studio (including Henri-Pierre Picou and Jean-Louis Hamon), and was championed by the influential French critic Théophile Gautier, whose review made Gérôme famous and effectively launched his career.

Gérôme abandoned his dream of winning the Prix de Rome and took advantage of his sudden success.

His paintings The Virgin, the Infant Jesus and Saint John and Anacreon, Bacchus and Eros took a second-class medal at the Paris Salon in 1848.

In 1849, he produced the paintings Michelangelo (also called In his Studio) and A Portrait of a Lady.

The prince had bought his Greek Interior (1850), a depiction of a brothel also in the Pompeian manner.

In 1851, he decorated a vase later offered by Emperor Napoleon III of France to Prince Albert, now part of the Royal Collection at St. James's Palace, London.

He exhibited Greek Interior, Souvenir d'Italie, Bacchus and Love, Drunk in 1851; Paestum in 1852; and An Idyll in 1853.

In 1852, Gérôme received a commission to paint a large mural of an allegorical subject of his choosing.

The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ, which combined the birth of Christ with conquered nations paying homage to Augustus, may have been intended to flatter Napoleon III, whose government commissioned the mural and who was identified as a "new Augustus."

A considerable down payment enabled Gérôme to travel and research, first in 1853 to Constantinople, together with the actor Edmond Got, and in 1854 to Greece and Turkey and the shores of the Danube, where he was present at a concert of Russian conscripts making music under the threat of a lash.

In 1853, Gérôme moved to the Boîte à Thé, a group of studios in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Paris.

This became a meeting place for artists, writers and actors, where George Sand entertained the composers: Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms and Gioachino Rossini and the novelists Théophile Gautier and Ivan Turgenev.

In 1854, he completed another important commission, decorating the Chapel of St. Jerome in the church of St. Séverin in Paris.

His Last Communion of St. Jerome in this chapel reflects the influence of the school of Ingres on his religious works.

To the Universal Exhibition of 1855 he contributed Pifferaro, Shepherd, and The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ, but it was the modest painting Recreation in a Russian Camp that garnered the most attention.

In 1856, Gérôme visited Egypt for the first time.

His itinerary followed the classic Grand Tour of the Near East, up the Nile to Cairo, across to Faiyum, then further up the Nile to Abu Simbel, then back to Cairo, across the Sinai Peninsula through Sinai and up the Wadi el-Araba to Jerusalem and finally Damascus.

This heralded the start of many Orientalist paintings depicting Arab religious practice, genre scenes and North African landscapes.

Among these are paintings in which the Oriental setting is combined with depictions of female nudity.

The Slave Market, The Large Pool of Bursa, Pool in a Harem, and similar subjects were works of imagination in which Gérôme combined accurately observed Middle Eastern architectural details with idealized nudes painted in his Paris studio.

Gérôme's reputation was greatly enhanced at the Paris Salon of 1857 by his display of Egyptian Recruits Crossing the Desert, Memnon and Sesostris, Camels Watering, and Suite d'un bal masqué (purchased by the duc d'Aumale, now in the Musée Condé in Chantilly; a copy made by Gérôme in 1859, The Duel After the Masquerade, is in the Walters Art Museum).

In 1858, he helped to decorate the Paris house of Prince Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte in the Pompeian style.

In an autobiographical essay of 1878, Gérôme described how important oil sketches made on the spot were for him: "Even when worn out after long marches under the bright sun, as soon as our camping spot was reached I got down to work with concentration. But Oh! How many things were left behind of which I carried only the memory away! And I prefer three touches of color on a piece of canvas to the most vivid memory, but one had to continue on with some regret."

His paintings were so widely reproduced that he was "arguably the world's most famous living artist by 1880."

The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits, and other subjects, bringing the academic painting tradition to an artistic climax.

He is considered one of the most important painters from this academic period.

He was also a teacher with a long list of students.

Jean-Léon Gérôme was born at Vesoul, Haute-Saône.

It was here that Gérôme first received instruction in drawing during his youth in school.

He was instructed by local artist and teacher Claude-Basile Cariage, under whom he produced work of sufficient quality to merit more auspicious tutelage.

(In 2019, the right wing populist German party, Alternative for Germany, used The Slave Market in a campaign poster in the 2019 European Parliament election.)

In his travels, Gérôme collected artefacts and costumes for staging oriental scenes in the studio, and also made oil studies from nature for the backgrounds.