Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor born on the 11th of May 1824 in Vesoul, France. He was arguably the world's most famous living artist by 1880, known for historical paintings, Orientalist scenes, Greek mythology, and portraits painted in the academic style. His career also produced roughly 700 paintings and 70 sculptures.
Between 1864 and 1904, more than 2,000 students received training through Gérôme's atelier at the École des Beaux-Arts. Notable students included Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Edwin Lord Weeks, Osman Hamdi Bey, Odilon Redon, and Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin.
Pollice Verso is an 1872 painting by Gérôme depicting gladiators and spectators in the Colosseum, with a crowd signaling the fate of a fallen fighter. The American collector Alexander Turney Stewart purchased it for 80,000 francs, setting a record price for the artist. The painting's imagery of the turned thumb was subsequently repeated in films including the 2000 Oscar-winner Gladiator.
Gérôme was a fierce public opponent of Impressionism. In 1894 he organized a demonstration in his atelier against the Caillebotte bequest of Impressionist paintings to the French state, calling the works "inanities" and "junk" in interviews with the journal L'Éclair. He also objected to the Manet memorial exhibition held at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1884.
Gérôme's standing collapsed in the twentieth century; his painting The Snake Charmer, which sold for $19,500 in 1888, fetched only $500 in 1942. A critical reassessment began in the 2000s, marked by major exhibitions at the Getty Museum and the Musée d'Orsay in 2010. Recent auction prices have reached several million pounds, and there is now high collector interest in his work in the Middle East, including from the Qatar Museums Authority in Doha.
Gérôme's Tanagra, completed in 1890, is a five-foot-high tinted-marble female nude personifying the Tyche, or presiding spirit, of the ancient Greek city of Tanagra. She holds on her upraised palm a small Hoop Dancer figurine that Gérôme invented himself, inspired by but not directly copied from actual excavated Tanagra figurines. Smaller gilded bronze versions of Tanagra and the Hoop Dancer became the most widely reproduced of all his sculptures.