Jean-Léon Gérôme

Jean-Léon Gérôme was born in 1824 in Vesoul in eastern France, the son of a goldsmith. In 1840 he entered the Paris studio of Paul Delaroche, accompanied his teacher to Rome in 1843 and later studied briefly with Charles Gleyre. His painting The Cock Fight made his name at the Salon of 1847. Gérôme was one of the most influential academic painters in nineteenth-century France. His pictures are meticulously finished, with smooth surfaces and carefully researched detail, and range over ancient history, religion and the East; Pollice Verso, a scene in the Roman arena, became especially famous. In 1856 he traveled to Egypt for the first time, and he returned to the Near East and North Africa many times, bringing back sketches and material that made him a leading Orientalist. He married the daughter of the dealer Adolphe Goupil, whose reproduction prints spread his work around the world. From 1864 he taught at the École des Beaux-Arts for nearly forty years, with pupils from Europe and America, including the American painter Thomas Eakins, and he was a fierce opponent of the Impressionists. Bashi-Bazouk, painted in 1868 to 1869, depicts an irregular soldier of the Ottoman army draped in sumptuous silks, their texture rendered with astonishing realism. In later life he also worked as a sculptor. He died in Paris in 1904.