page_title: Jean-Léon Gérôme
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Jean-Léon Gérôme / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Banner for the Haggin Museum in Stockton, CA, using detail from Jean-Léon Gérôme's The Standing Bearer, Unfolding the Holy Flag" (1876)
context_page_description: Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as academicism. His paintings were so widely reproduced that he was "arguably the world's most famous living artist by 1880." The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits, and other subjects, bringing the academic painting tradition to an artistic climax. He is considered one of the most important painters from this academic period. He was also a teacher with a long list of students.
context_section_description: Gérôme's legacy lived on through the works of his thousands of students from many countries, including Odilon Redon, Mary Cassatt, Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin, Stanisław Chlebowski, Ahmed Ali Bey, and Hosui Yamamoto, and many who traveled to Paris from the United States to study under him, including Thomas Eakins, Edwin Lord Weeks and Gottardo Piazzoni.
  Gérôme's prodigious energy, long career, and wide popularity resulted in an enormous body of work that now resides in museums and private collections around the world; Ackerman's revised catalogue raisonné of 2018 lists approximately 700 paintings and 70 sculptures. 
  His well-researched and minutely detailed images of gladiator combats, chariot races, slave markets, and many other subjects from the ancient world created an indelible impression on popular culture.
  His ethnographic imagery of Arab and Islamic culture, controversial in his own lifetime, is now even more closely scrutinized, as is his penchant for female nudity; modern critics raise issues of "cultural appropriation" and "sexual exploitation". These issues of sex and race were epitomized by the use in 2019 of his painting The Slave Market in an anti-Muslim campaign poster by the right wing populist German party, Alternative for Germany, to the consternation of the American museum that owns the painting.
  Despite charges that the Orientalizing paintings of Gérôme (and others) exploited and indulged in stereotypes of Arab and Muslim cultures, there is now "a high level of interest in collecting Gérôme's art in the Middle East," as evinced by high prices paid at auction for his work by the Qatar Museums Authority in Doha.
  In the early 1870s Gérôme was known for an astonishing range of visual exotica, all realized in precise, minute detail, achieved with thin layers of paint that revealed nary a brushstroke…His works were particularly sought after by wealthy Americans…Over the course of his career, Gérôme sold to American patrons 144 paintings, nearly a quarter of his production. [A work by Gérôme in the Nob Hill mansion of Leland Stanford was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.] Despite his prodigious output and enormous transatlantic success, most scholarly articles of recent decades cite Gérôme's work as a noxious blend of the trite, the exploitative and the stultifying academic. However, the latest scholarship is re-evaluating Gérôme and his importance in the nineteenth century. A 2010 essay by art historian Mary G. Morton…points out that, contrary to most twenty- and twenty-first century perspectives…Americans [in the 1800s] found Gérôme's paintings complex, edifying and completely modern.
  
  His highly vocal opposition to Impressionism was a losing argument, and his work was relegated to the margins of art history by critics, historians, and museum professionals who believed that
  his chosen themes corrupted the loftier purposes of art, thus leading to commercialism…they also objected to his orientalism, which they disparaged for being untrue, a perversion or concoction of the true Orient.…Now, with the exhibition at the Getty Museum, and a larger version of the show opening at the Musée d'Orsay in October 2010, Gérôme is finally receiving the attention he deserves. No longer will he be lost in time, although his paintings, the way he developed them, and his relationship with many of the major issues of artistic creativity in the nineteenth century and beyond will remain controversial.
   
  As with other painters of Classical Realism and Academic art of the 19th century, Gérôme's prestige and popularity sharply declined in the 20th century; his painting The Snake Charmer, which sold for $19,500 in 1888, sold for $500 in 1942. Now his works are once again sought-after in the international art market. In 2008, his painting Femme circassienne voilée or Veiled Circassian Beauty (1876) was auctioned for 2,057,250 GBP; it now belongs to the Qatar Museums Authority in Doha. In 2019, his painting The Harem in the Kiosk (c. 1870–1875) realized 2,655,000 GBP at auction, and his painting Riders Cr
caption: Banner for the Haggin Museum in Stockton, CA, using detail from Gérôme's The Standing Bearer, Unfolding the Holy Flag (1876).
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