Jean-Léon Gérôme

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Jean-Léon Gérôme was born on the 11th of May 1824 in Vesoul, a small town in the Haute-Saône region of France, and by 1880 he had become arguably the most famous living artist in the world. That rise was not built on one triumphant canvas but on a career of relentless output, spanning historical paintings, Greek mythology, Orientalist scenes, portraits, and eventually sculpture. He left behind roughly 700 paintings and 70 sculptures, and he taught more than 2,000 students. His imagery shaped how audiences from Paris to New York pictured ancient Rome, the Arab world, and the nature of beauty itself. Yet by the mid-twentieth century, a single painting of his that had sold for $19,500 in 1888 fetched just $500 in 1942. How does the world's most famous artist become an almost forgotten footnote? And what does it mean that his paintings are now selling at auction for millions of pounds? The answers run through a cobblestone studio in Paris, the sand of the Nile, and a fierce lifelong argument about what art is actually for.

• 2. A Young Man Goes to Paris

  ›

  Gérôme's first drawing lessons came from a local artist named Claude-Basile Cariage, who taught in Vesoul's schools. That instruction was good enough to earn the young Gérôme a ticket to Paris, and in 1840, at the age of sixteen, he began studying under Paul Delaroche. Three years later, Delaroche took him along to Italy, where they visited Florence, Rome, the Vatican, and Pompeii. Back in Paris by 1844, Gérôme briefly joined the atelier of Charles Gleyre before moving on to the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1846, he attempted the Prix de Rome, the most prestigious prize a French art student could win, and failed in the final round because his figure drawing was not up to standard. That same year he produced The Cock Fight, a meticulously observed scene of a nude young man, a lightly draped young woman, and two fighting cocks set against the Bay of Naples. He sent it to the Paris Salon of 1847, where it won him a third-class medal. What mattered more than the medal was the critic Théophile Gautier, whose review of the painting made Gérôme famous almost overnight and launched his entire professional career. In 1848, two more paintings took second-class medals at the Salon, and the Prix de Rome was quietly abandoned. His new career had made it unnecessary.

• 3. Power, Patrons, and Commissions

  ›

  In 1851, Gérôme decorated a vase that Emperor Napoleon III later gave to Prince Albert; it now sits in the Royal Collection at St. James's Palace in London. That kind of proximity to power defined his early middle career. A commission in 1852 asked him to paint a large allegorical mural, and the result, The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ, combined Christian iconography with conquered nations bowing before Rome's first emperor. Art historians have noted that the mural may have been designed to flatter Napoleon III, whose government paid for it and who was publicly styled a "new Augustus." The commission funded travel: in 1853 Gérôme went to Constantinople with the actor Edmond Got, and in 1854 he moved on to Greece, Turkey, and the banks of the Danube, where he witnessed Russian conscripts making music under threat of a lash. In 1853, he settled into a shared studio complex on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs known as the Boîte à Thé, which became a gathering point for artists, writers, and musicians. George Sand held salon there; the composers Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms, and Gioachino Rossini all passed through, as did the novelists Théophile Gautier and Ivan Turgenev. In 1854, a separate commission saw Gérôme decorate the Chapel of St. Jerome in the Parisian church of St. Séverin. His marriage in 1863 to Marie Goupil, daughter of the international art dealer Adolphe Goupil, deepened his ties to the commercial art world and brought him into contact with the most powerful distribution network for paintings in the nineteenth century.

• 4. The Orient Imagined

  ›

  In 1856, Gérôme made his first trip to Egypt, following what he later described as the classic Grand Tour of the Near East: up the Nile to Cairo, across to Faiyum, further south to Abu Simbel, then back through the Sinai Peninsula to Jerusalem and finally Damascus. He returned from these journeys with oil sketches made on the spot, collected costumes and artefacts, and built a working method in which accurately observed architectural backgrounds were combined with nudes painted in his Paris studio. In an autobiographical essay written in 1878, he described working on those field sketches even after exhausting marches under a bright sun, adding: "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." The paintings that resulted, among them The Slave Market, The Great Bath at Bursa, and Pool in a Harem, became among his most commercially successful works. His display at the Paris Salon of 1857, which included Egyptian Recruits Crossing the Desert, Memnon and Sesostris, and Camels Watering, greatly enhanced his reputation. One painting from that group, Suite d'un bal masqué, was purchased by the duc d'Aumale and now hangs in the Musée Condé in Chantilly. A copy Gérôme made in 1859, titled The Duel After the Masquerade, is in the Walters Art Museum. In 2019, the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany used The Slave Market in a campaign poster for the European Parliament election, a use that disturbed the American museum that owns the painting and that brought unwelcome new attention to the most contested layer of his legacy.

• 5. The Atelier

  ›

  Gérôme's appointment as one of three professors at the École des Beaux-Arts marked a turning point in the French art world's institutional life. He began with sixteen students. Between 1864 and 1904, more than 2,000 students passed through his atelier, among them Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Edwin Lord Weeks, Osman Hamdi Bey, Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin, and Odilon Redon. Admission was competitive; places were limited and considered an honour to obtain. Gérôme moved students through a careful sequence: drawing from antique works and casts, then life study with live models chosen primarily for physique, and only then permission to work in oils. The studio floor sloped so that students at the back of the room had a full view of the model, while the most junior students sat at the front and concentrated on the bust or a single part of the anatomy. According to John Milner, who studied with him, the atelier was by reputation the most riotous and the most lewd of all the studios at Beaux-Arts, a place of rough initiation rites that included slashing canvases, throwing students down stairs, and staging fencing matches in the nude on the model's dais with paintbrushes loaded with paint. Yet Gérôme attended every Wednesday and Saturday, demanded punctuality, and was known as a severe critic. His American student Stephen Wilson Van Shaick described him as "merciless in judgement" but possessed of a "singular magnetism." Despite the strictness, Gérôme invited students to his personal studio, made recommendations on their behalf to the Salon, and encouraged them to study with his colleagues.

• 6. Gladiators, Glory, and a Growing Divide

  ›

  In 1865, after four previous failed attempts, Gérôme was elected a member of the Institut de France. Already a knight of the Légion d'honneur, he was promoted to officer in 1867. In 1869, he was elected an honorary member of the British Royal Academy, received the Grand Order of the Red Eagle, Third Class from the King of Prussia Wilhelm I, and attended the opening of the Suez Canal. The same year he became a regular guest of Empress Eugénie at the Imperial Court in Compiègne. His painting The Execution of Marshal Ney, exhibited at the Salon of 1868, put him at the centre of a public dispute when Ney's descendants asked him to withdraw it; he refused. Critics accused him of exploiting literary themes and commercialising art, and the 1868 Salon opened a lasting divide between Gérôme and much of the French critical establishment. Four years later, in 1872, he produced Pollice Verso, a canvas depicting blood-soaked gladiators and an impassioned crowd in the Colosseum. The collector Alexander Turney Stewart paid 80,000 francs for it, setting a new record for the artist. The turned thumb at the centre of the painting was subsequently repeated in films ranging from the silent era through the 2000 Oscar-winner Gladiator. At the Salon of 1873 he exhibited L'Eminence Grise, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a colorful scene set in the palace staircase of Cardinal Richelieu depicting François Leclerc du Tremblay, the Capuchin friar who served as Richelieu's chief adviser and whose title gave the modern world the phrase "the power behind the throne."

• 7. Sculptor, Pilgrim of Form

  ›

  Gérôme took up sculpture in his thirties. His first major public work was a large bronze gladiator shown at the Universal Exhibition of 1878, based directly on Pollice Verso. The same year he exhibited a marble figure at the Salon, drawn from his 1848 painting Anacreon, Bacchus and Eros. He was aware of contemporary experiments in tinting marble, such as those by the British sculptor John Gibson, and he pushed the practice further, combining tinted marble, bronze, and ivory inlaid with precious stones and paste. His statue Bellona, in ivory, bronze, and gemstones, drew significant attention at the Royal Academy of London in 1892. In 1890, responding to the widespread fascination with ancient Tanagra figurines recently excavated in Greece, he sculpted a five-foot-high tinted-marble female figure personifying the Tyche, or presiding spirit, of the ancient city of Tanagra. The figurine she holds in her upraised palm, a female Hoop Dancer, was Gérôme's own invention, not a copy of any actual excavated figurine. The Hoop Dancer subsequently became, in the words of the scholarship, "Gérôme's most popular and widely reproduced sculpture." In 1903, near the end of his life, he executed two sculptures, Metallurgical Worker and Metallurgical Science, for the American millionaire Charles M. Schwab, intended to celebrate steel production. Schwab sent an actual steel worker from the United States to Paris to serve as the model.

• 8. Truth, Photography, and a Final Reckoning

  ›

  Starting in the mid-1890s, Gérôme made at least four paintings of Truth personified as a nude woman, either in or emerging from a well. The imagery came from a saying attributed to the philosopher Democritus: "Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well." Truth Coming Out of Her Well, Armed with Her Whip to Chastise Mankind was exhibited at the Salon du Champ de Mars in 1896. Though many assumed it was a comment on the Dreyfus affair, art historian Bernard Tillier argues that the well paintings were part of Gérôme's ongoing battle against Impressionism. In 1894, he had caused a separate scandal by publicly opposing the bequest of Gustave Caillebotte's Impressionist collection to the French state, the collection that eventually became the foundation of the Musée d'Orsay's holdings. He organized a demonstration in his atelier and gave interviews to reporters, telling the journal L'Éclair: "The Institut de France cannot remain still before such a scandal...The state, the ward of such junk!" He attended the 1884 Manet memorial exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts, and afterwards paid Manet the backhanded compliment that it was "not so bad as I thought." In a 1902 preface, Gérôme used the well metaphor to praise photography in French, writing that photography "has opened our eyes and forced us to see that which previously we have not seen" and that "it is thanks to photography that Truth has finally come out of her well. She will never go back." On the 31st of December 1903, he wrote to his former student Albert Aublet, "I begin to have enough of life." Ten days later, on the 10th of January 1904, he died at age 79 in the small room next to his atelier, reportedly slumped in front of a portrait of Rembrandt and at the foot of his own painting of Truth. At his request, the burial was simple and without flowers, though the Requiem Mass that followed was attended by a former president of the Republic, leading politicians, and many painters and writers. He was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery before the statue La Douleur, which he had cast in memory of his son Jean, who had died in 1891. The Anne de Beaujeu Museum in Moulins, which now owns Truth Coming Out of Her Well, mounted an exhibition in 2012 devoted to the painting and its variants; one of the curators described it as "our Mona Lisa."