The Terrace of the Seraglio (1898)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Terrace of the Seraglio

Leda and the Swan (1895)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Leda and the Swan

Truth Coming out of the Well (1895)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Truth Coming out of the Well, 

Armed with a Whip to Punish Mankind

Monday morning usually greets the world like the woman in this painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme.  The figure of truth emerges from a well holding a scourge with which to shame and punish humankind.  The image makes literal reference to a saying by the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus (ca. 460 BC – ca. 370 BC): “Truth lies at the bottom of a well."  Some have interpreted the painting as a reference to the Dreyfus affair, while others discuss the it in the context of a quote by Gérôme that "thanks to photography, Truth has finally left her well.” – [WTF Art History]

The Color Grinder (1891)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Color Grinder

Working in Marble (1890)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Working in Marble (aka The Artist Sculpting Tanagra)

This complex self-portrait is a summation of Gérôme’s remarkable career as both painter and sculptor. It is also a commemoration of his famous sculpture Tanagra (1890, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), a stately nude personification of the ancient Greek city, who holds one of the small painted figurines for which the artisans of that city were known. These figurines were discovered and exhibited widely in the late 19th century, reinforcing the notion that classical sculpture was originally vividly colored. Inspired by his characteristic desire for both archaeological accuracy and realism, Gérôme delicately tinted the skin, hair, lips, and nipples of his Tanagra, causing a sensation at the Salon of 1890.

Like most 19th-century sculptors, Gérôme did not carve the marble himself but furnished professional marble cutters with a full-size plaster to use as a guide. It is this intermediate step that is depicted in Working in Marble, a title that refers to the overall creative process. Gérôme portrays himself on a turn stand putting the finishing touches on the plaster version of Tanagra, carefully judging the accuracy of his work against the live model. He is in his second-floor painting studio (which could not actually have housed an unfinished marble of that size), described by a contemporary as a “splendid room, with its great sculptures and paintings, some still unfinished, and a famous collection of barbaric arms and costumes.” Indeed, this painting includes many of these props—quiver, saddle, armor, drums, waterpipes, flag, textiles, masks—used regularly by Gérôme to enhance the authenticity of his Orientalist and classical scenes. It also contains several of his finished works: the Tanagra-inspired Hoop Dancer; Selene the moon goddess; and his painting Pygmalion and Galatea (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). This small image of a marble sculpture transformed into female flesh provides a mythological gloss on Gérôme’s own activity in Working in Marble, powerfully evoking the continuous interplay between painting and sculpture, reality and artifice, as well as highlighting the inherently theatrical nature of the artist’s studio. [Dahesh Museum]

Pygmalion and Galatea (1890)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Pygmalion and Galatea

Between 1890 and 1892, Gérôme made both painted and sculpted variations on the theme of Pygmalion and Galatea, the tale recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book X, lines 243–97). All depict the moment when the sculpture of Galatea was brought to life by the goddess Venus, in fulfillment of Pygmalion’s wish for a wife as beautiful as the sculpture he created. Gérôme’s correspondence with his biographer Fanny Field Hering provides information about the origins of the present picture. In 1890 the artist remarked that he had begun painting Pygmalion and Galatea, stating that he was trying to rejuvenate the subject, which he thought very hackneyed, and adding that the picture would depict the statue coming to life. In November 1890, he mentioned Pygmalion and Galatea among several pictures that he had painted the prior summer, which were nearly finished. [Metropolitan Museum of Art]

Jean-Léon Gérôme (1889)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Bathsheba

 

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Nude Woman

  

Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Harem Bath

  

Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Marabout in the Harem Bath

The Black Poet (1888)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Black Poet

The Carpet Merchant (ca. 1887)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Carpet Merchant

The Harem on the Terrace (1886)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Harem on the Terrace

The End of the Sitting (1886)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: The End of the Sitting

Jean-Léon Gérôme was one of the most famous French painters of his day. In the course of his long career, he was the subject of controversy and bitter criticism, in particular for defending the conventions of the waning genre of Academic painting, under attack by Realists and Impressionists.

Gérôme's fascination with the act of sculpting, with the sculptor's mastery of material and the ability to give it form, drew him to the myth of Pygmalion bringing life to Galatea. This was the image he used when portraying himself as a sculptor in The End of the Sitting, creating an interplay between the redundant presence of the living model and the statue that is taking shape. His works closely combine references from classical mythology with the contingent reality of his studio. [Gandalf’s Gallery]

Pool in a Harem (1885)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Pool in a Harem

Slave Markets (1884)

Two views of Roman slave markets from Jean-Léon Gérôme.

 Jean-Léon Gérôme: A Roman Slave Market

  

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Slave Market in Rome

The Two Majesties (1883)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Two Majesties

A highly esteemed Salon painter and respected professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, Jean-Léon Gérôme embodied the artistic establishment of late-nineteenth-century Paris. Like Delacroix and Chassériau before him, Gérôme recorded the daily life and customs of the people and places he saw on his many travels to North Africa and the Near East with the zeal of an ethnographer. This painting is remarkable for its quiet solemnity. A huge, solitary lion, the king of the beasts, gazes across the seemingly endless terrain at the majestic setting sun, thus explaining the romantic title. The eerie grandeur is dramatized by the lion's profile, the single vertical element, against the horizontal planes of the desert. [Milwaukee Art Museum]

Arnaut Blowing Smoke at his Dog (1882)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Arnaut Blowing Smoke at his Dog

I nominate this guy for the title of biggest jerk ever to be depicted in a painting.

The Tulip Folly (1882)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Tulip Folly

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]

After the Bath (ca. 1881)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: After the Bath

Yet another in the long line of harem bath paintings by Gérôme. I'm sure they sold well...

Bashi-Bazouk Singing (1881)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: Bashi-Bazouk Singing

An Albanian soldier, called an Arnaut, is seated beside his hookah (water pipe), playing an oud (a lute-like instrument) accompanied by the cawing of a pet raven perched on its cage. Seated in the background are three Bashi-Bazouks, or members of the Ottoman Empire's irregular troops, who were noted for their ferocity. Gérôme visited Greece and Turkey in 1854, sailed up the Nile River in 1857, and returned to the Near East on a number of occasions. Much of his work was devoted to orientalist paintings, which he imbued with a sense of reality by providing a wealth of details. [The Walters Art Museum]

The Wailing Wall (1880)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Wailing Wall

The Snake Charmer (1880)

Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Snake Charmer

Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting The Snake Charmer is a sleazy imperialist vision of "the east". In front of glittering Islamic tiles that make the painting shimmer with blue and silver, a group of men sit on the ground watching a nude snake charmer, draped with a slithering phallic python.

This is one of the French paintings lent by the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, to the Royal Academy for its exhibition From Paris: A Taste for Impressionism. Yet Gérôme is no impressionist. Painted in about 1879, this is a glitteringly cinematic slice of orientalist fantasy. Gérôme was the kind of painter the impressionists were rebelling against – a pristine purveyor of high-gloss dreams.

Yet his pictures are weirdly compelling: a pupil of the historical painter Paul Delaroche, whose Execution of Lady Jane Grey hangs in London's National Gallery, he painted detailed, brilliantly lit spectacles such as gladiators fighting in the ancient Roman arena. Gérôme's Roman empire fantasies had a direct influence on early Hollywood and still echo in modern blockbusters like Gladiator.
However, the painting by him I know best is The Snake Charmer, because it is on the cover of an old paperback copy of Edward Said's famous book, Orientalism, which I bought ages ago as a student and happened to be looking at the other day. The Snake Charmer is such an obviously pernicious and exploitative western fantasy of "the Orient" that it makes Said's case for him. Gérôme is, you might say, orientalism's poster boy. In this influential work, Said analyses how Middle Eastern societies were described by European "experts" in the 19th century in ways that delighted the western imagination while reducing the humanity of those whom that imagination fed on. In The Snake Charmer, voyeurism is titillated, and yet the blame for this is shifted on to the slumped audience in the painting. Meanwhile, the beautiful tiles behind them are seen as a survival of older and finer cultures which – according to Edward Said – western orientalists claimed to know and love better than the decadent locals did. [The Guardian]