artist-gerome

[artist-gerome]

Study of a Dog, 1852(?)

[artist-gerome]

Bashi-Bazouk, 1868–69

This arresting picture was made after Gérôme returned to Paris from a twelve-week journey to the Near East in early 1868. He was at the height of his career when he dressed a model in his studio with textiles he had acquired during the expedition. The artist’s Turkish title for this picture—which translates as "headless"—evokes the unpaid irregular soldiers who fought ferociously for plunder under Ottoman leadership, although it is difficult to imagine this man charging into battle wearing such an exquisite silk tunic. Gérôme’s virtuosic treatment of textures provides a sumptuous counterpoint to the figure’s dignified bearing.

—The Metropolitan Museum of Art

[artist-gerome]

Napoleon and His General Staff in Egypt, ca. 1867

Is the viewer intended to understand this painting as representing a specific episode in the Egyptian campaign?  By the 1860s, numerous memoirs by Napoleon’s closest aides had been published, as had his own correspondence, so that Gérôme would have been able to read first-hand accounts. Among the most vivid and reliable descriptions of the campaign was that by Napoleon’s secretary, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, whose memoirs were published in 1831. By far the worst episode was the army’s retreat from Acre in late May 1799, following the fruitless siege of the fortress, where the French were outmanoeuvred by an alliance between Djezzar Pasha, the Ottoman military governor, and the British under Sir Sidney Smith; Napoleon had lost four thousand men, a third of the total force that had set out from Cairo, and had 1200 wounded soldiers. The French army was effectively defeated by a terrain for which it was unprepared. The retreat across the desert was terrible, as Bourrienne described: ‘An all-consuming thirst, the total lack of water, the overwhelming heat, the tiring march through the burning sand dunes, made the men lose all sense of compassion, so that they succumbed to the most cruel selfishness...I saw them throw men off their stretchers, officers who had amputated limbs whom they were ordered to carry, who had even given them money for their troubles....The sun, in all its power in the clear sky, was obscured by the smoke of the fires we had set to lay waste. Behind us the desert that we had made, before us the privations and the sufferings that awaited us’. It is very probable that Gérôme’s painting represents this episode in the campaign.

—Andrew Clayton-Payne

[artist-gerome]

The Draught Players, 1859

The players have been identified as Arnauts, Albanian soldiers in the service of Mohammed Ali in Egypt, when a photogravure of the painting was issued by the publishers Goupil. The type of bench on which they sit appears in several other paintings by Gérôme. The Wallace Collection's painting is a fine demonstration of Gérôme's meticulous, high-keyed manner which was an important constituent of his popular success. He made many visits to the Middle East between 1854 and 1875.

—The Wallace Collection

[artist-gerome]

The Duel after the Masquerade, 1859

In this painting, showing the outcome of a duel after a costume ball, Gérôme replicates, with slight variations, a composition he had executed for the Duc d'Aumale in 1857. It is dawn on a wintry day in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, and Pierrot succumbs in the arms of the Duc de Guise. A Venetian doge examines Pierrot's wound while Domino clasps his head in despair. To the right, the victorious American Indian departs, accompanied by Harlequin.

—The Walters Art Museum

[artist-gerome]

King Candaules of Lydia, 1858

This is a preparatory oil sketch for a much larger painting shown at the Salon of 1859 (Museo d’Arte, Ponce, Puerto Rico) and exemplifies Gérôme’s interest in reviving an ancient past based on careful historical research. His attention to archeological details made Gérôme a leader of the so-called néo-grec movement that culminated in the 1860s. Set in the mythical East, in Lydia, this episode unfolds in the bedchamber of the king, Candaules. While his wife, Queen Rodolphe, slowly undresses, Candaules’s favorite lieutenant Gyges watches from the doorway, having been invited to do so by Candaulus, who vainly wishes to flaunt his wife’s beauty. Rodolphe is enraged and, at her request, Gyges later assassinates the king and assumes the Lydian throne himself.

Gérôme’s image was interpreted in two ways: some thought it depicted the moment when Gyges first saw Rodolphe, while others saw it as just prior to the king’s death, with the disrobing queen providing a distraction. The legend is recounted by the ancient historian Herodotus, but Gérôme was more likely to have taken it from one of his champions, the writer and critic Théophile Gautier, who published his own version of the story in serial form in 1844. Gautier’s novella offered a similarly detailed description of the king’s bedchamber and dwelt at length on this scene, which the writer called one of “visual adultery.”

—Dahesh Museum of Art

[artist-gerome]

Jerusalem, also called Golgotha, Consumatum est; The Crucifixion, 1867

After exploring with great success the exotic, sensual attractions of the Orientalist repertoire, Gérôme returned in 1867 to his first ambition, history painting. He breathed original power and conviction into this declining genre by approaching it through the prism of archaeological and topographical truth, verified by numerous journeys to the Middle East, notably to the Holy Land. Historical exactitude is here crossed with the naturalist version of Christ which Ernest Renan had developed in his Vie de Jésus published in 1863, which profoundly influenced religious representation in the second half of the century. But Gérôme was aiming for more than just reconstitution and veracity. He sought to revive the religious genre through unprecedented pictorial solutions as a way of enhancing the powerful message of the Gospels. Although, in keeping with the classical tradition, the landscape participates in the dramatic mood, the composition makes fine use of an "off-camera" effect, a cinematographic technique before its time. The powerful visual ellipsis of the shadows of the three crosses thrown by the light of a stormy sky was such startling break with the traditional representation of the theme that Gérôme's painting attracted some of the harshest criticism of his career.

—Musée d'Orsay

[artist-gerome]

Nominor Leo, 1883

The title of this painting is presumably taken from Hugo, who used the phrase quia nominor leo (roughly translated "Because I am called lion" (a reference to Aesop?)) in his Notre Dame de Paris (AKA, The Hunchback of Notre Dame).

[artist-gerome]

The Tulip Folly, 1882

Gérôme illustrates an incident during the "tulipomania," or the craze for tulips, that swept the Netherlands and much of Europe during the 17th century. The tulip, originally imported from Turkey in the 16th century, became an increasingly valuable commodity. By 1636/7, tulipomania peaked, and, when the market crashed, speculators were left with as little as 5 percent of their original investments. In this scene, a nobleman guards an exceptional bloom as soldiers trample flowerbeds in a vain attempt to stabilize the tulip market by limiting the supply.

—The Walters Art Museum

[artist-gerome]

Arab Girl with Waterpipe, 1873

[artist-gerome]

Young Greeks Attending a Cock Fight, 1846

Gérôme started work on this canvas in 1846 when he was still smarting from his failure to win the Prix de Rome which would have opened the doors of the Villa Medicis to him. He feared a new rebuff and hesitated to exhibit his Young Greeks Attending a Cock Fight. But, encouraged by his master, the academic painter Delaroche, he finally entered his painting in the Salon of 1847, where it was a great success.

In the "Neo-Grec" style, characterised by a taste for meticulous finish, pale colours and smooth brushwork, Gérôme portrays a couple of near-naked adolescents at the foot of a fountain. Their youthfulness contrasts with the battered profile of the Sphinx in the background. The same opposition is found between the luxuriant vegetation and the dead branches on the ground, and in the fight between the two roosters, one of which is doomed to die.

In the chorus of praise for the work, few commentators noticed the artist's disillusioned attitude. Hardly anyone but Baudelaire criticised the canvas, calling Gérôme the leader of the "meticulous school", and finding him weak and artificial. The public preferred the opinion of Théophile Gautier who saw in The Cock Fight "wonders of drawing, action and colour". At the age of twenty-three, Gérôme therefore made a brilliant entry into the art world and thereafter pursued the official career he had planned for himself, punctuated with honours and rewards.

—Musée d'Orsay

[artist-gerome]

Egyptian Recruits Crossing the Desert, 1857

[artist-gerome]

Diogenes, 1860

The Greek philosopher Diogenes (404-323 BC) is seated in his abode, the earthenware tub, in the Metroon, Athens, lighting the lamp in daylight with which he was to search for an honest man. His companions were dogs that also served as emblems of his "Cynic" (Greek: "kynikos," dog-like) philosophy, which emphasized an austere existence. Three years after this painting was first exhibited, Gerome was appointed a professor of painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he would instruct many students, both French and foreign.

—The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore