The success of his first Salon painting in 1847, Jeunes Grecs faisant battre des coqs (Young Greeks holding a Cock Fight) (Musée du Louvre, Paris) encouraged Gérome and several fellow students to paint other pictures in the same vein. Hailed as les Néo-Grecs or les Pompéistes, they presented antiquity as witty, erotic and trivial, instead of dry ancient history. While Gérome's comrades, Hamon, Boulanger, Picou and Aubert, lived off this skittish neo-Greek style for the rest of their lives, Gérome changed to a more serious, remarkably realistic and less obviously commercial approach. He began his career as an ethnographical painter with a small picture shown at the 1855 Universal Exhibition alongside his monumental, neoclassical, L'Äge d'Auguste (The Age of Augustus) (Musée de Picardie, Amiens). He had sketched the soldiers and guards for this work, Récréation du camp, souvenir de Moldavie (Camp Recreation, Remembrance of Moldavia), during a trip to the Balkans in 1853. Realistically and objectively painted, its unexpected and unusual composition (always one of Gérome's strong points) gave it its originality. In 1856, he visited Egypt. Four months were spent navigating on the Nile with friends, with four further months in Cairo in a house lent by Soliman Pasha. Over the next few years, he sent many scenes of Egyptian life to the Salon, along with neo-Greek subjects, while gradually developing a speciality of seventeenthcentury topics, recent historical events and contemporary genre scenes. By the mid-1860s, Gérome, by now a member of the Institut, was established and prosperous. He no longer needed the commissions that had been so helpful at the beginning of his career. Indeed, he found it a positive burden to finish the long task of painting his last official work, the remarkably meticulous and complex picture La Réception des Ambassadeurs siamois par l'Empereur au Palais de Fontainebleau (Reception of Siamese Ambassadors by the Emperor in the Fontainebleau Palace) (Musée National de Versailles).
He had in any case found a ready-made clientele after his marriage to Marie Goupil, daughter of the influential picture dealer Adolphe Goupil. Not only did collectors — mainly American — slavishly follow Goupil's advice on buying contemporary academic artists, but Gérome benefited enormously from Goupil's worldwide distribution of photogravures and photographs of his work. In 1864, Gérome was invited by the French government to be one of the teachers in the new ateliers opened at the Paris School of Fine Arts, which were to give this declining institution a new lease of life. He carried out this role for nearly forty years with zeal and conscientiousness and was certainly loyal and generous to his students. He enjoyed an excellent reputation as a teacher, and young artists— some two thousand — came from all over the world to study under him. Many were to become Orientalists: Albert Aublet, Eugene Girardet, Jean Lecomte du Nouy, Auguste-Émile Pinchart, Henri Rousseau, the Greek Théodore Ralli, the Turks Hamdy Bey and Khalil Bey, the Russian Vassili Veretschagin and the Americans Arthur Frederick Bridgman and Edwin Lord Weeks. He transmitted to many of his pupils his technique of applying thin layers of paint with a highly polished, slick finish, while instilling a passion for accurate detail. What was more, he encouraged them to travel, for stay-at-homes became, he felt, "slaves to formulas and routine." Gérome himself loved exploring different countries and made many journeys, to Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, Greece, Spain, Algiers and Italy.
He probably found travelling a great relief from the restraints of the Paris art world.
Upon his return from a safari in 1868 (described by his travelling companion Paul Lenoir in Le Fayoum, Sinai et Petra [1872]), this normally impeccable artist was practically unrecognizable with "his suntanned complexion, his long beard worthy of a Bedouin, his frayed garments, including a pair of Lenoir's trousers that had been shortened with only relative success." According to Gerald Ackerman, who has spent years researching on Gérome, around two hundred and fifty out of six hundred or so finished works were of Orientalist subjects. Gérome was mainly interested in contemporary Muslim Cairo and Constantinople. Certain themes occur again and again, with variations in the compositions, including guards on duty at a monumental door, Arnauts (Albanian soldiers in the Ottoman army) in their full white skirts; bashi bazouks (mercenaries notorious for pillage and brutality), naked women in slave markets or hammams, scenes of private and congregational prayer. He made endless fine, detailed drawings as preparatory studies. Many of these he gave away to friends, with no thought of commercializing them. Others were inherited by his son-in-law, the painter Aimé Morot, and were sold privately by the family several years ago. On his return to Paris from a journey, Gérome would quickly start working, with astonishing facility and dexterity. He used Parisian models, as well as props and costumes that filled his drawing-room, which was decorated in the Oriental style. (p. 24-25). The quantity and variety of Gérome's pictures, of consistent quality, are such that it seems impossible for one man to have painted so much; indeed, it is more than certain that he was assisted from time to time by collaborators. The decline in Gérome's popularity started during his own lifetime. As an opponent of the Impressionists — quite naturally so, since their subjective painting was diametrically opposed to his own careful, studied methods — he became involved in political skirmishes and was vilified as being old hat. When he died in 1904 he was, in the words of Gerald Ackerman, "buried with official praise, public indifference and critical acrimony." He had intended to leave part of his collections to his native city of Vesoul, but his gift was refused because of insufficient room. However, both he and, later, his heirs did give the museum some good paintings and many of the innovative sculptures that Gérome had made from the 1870s on. He is still very poorly represented in French museums, however, although the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes owns the famous picture dated 1861, Le Prisonnier (The Prisoner). Nearly all his work was bought for American private and public collections but the prices for his pictures plummeted to such a ridiculous low in the 1950s that many American museums sold their Géromes. They can still be found, however, in museums in Williamstown, Elmira, Boston, Cincinnati, New York, Baltimore, Rochester, Kansas City.
Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Stockton. A victim of deeply-rooted prejudice, Gérome became practically unknown in his own country. Not until 1981 was he given an official retrospective exhibition in France. By then, he had been reinstated as one of the most influential and imaginative painters of the nineteenth century.
Literature: C. Timbal, "Les artistes contemporains: Gérome", Gazette des BeauxArts, vol. 14, Paris, 1876; E. Strahan (pseudonym of E. Shinn), Gérome, a collection of the works of J.L. Gérome in One Hundred Photogravures, New York, 1881-83; F. Field Hering, Gérome, his Life and Works, New York, 1892; F. Mason, "J.L. Gérome, Peintre de l'Orient," Figaro Illustré, Paris, July 1901; C. Moreau-Vauthier, Gérome, Peintre et Sculpteur, l'Homme et l'Artiste, Paris, 1906; Cuvres de J.L. Gérome, twenty-eight volumes of mounted studio photographs, Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, n.d.; Cuvres, album of 106 mounted studio photographs, Goupil & Cie, Paris, n.d.; G.M. Ackerman, Gérome, Painter and Sculptor (thesis), Pomona College, Claremont, California, 1982.