Jean-Leon Gerome

Jean-Leon Gerome painted the ancient and Islamic worlds with a photographic finish that made him enormously famous, then enormously unfashionable, then a case study in how images construct politics. He trained under Delaroche, travelled in Egypt and the Ottoman lands repeatedly, and taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for nearly forty years, where his pupils included Thomas Eakins and Odilon Redon. His Roman subjects are the ones everyone has seen without knowing it: Pollice Verso, showing a gladiator waiting on the crowd's thumbs, was the direct visual source for the film Gladiator, and The Death of Caesar shows the conspirators leaving while the body lies half out of frame. Bonaparte Before the Sphinx and his other Egyptian campaign pictures put Napoleon's 1798 expedition into a landscape of monumental antiquity, which is precisely how the expedition wished to be understood. He hated Impressionism and campaigned against the state accepting the Caillebotte bequest, which is largely what buried his reputation for most of the twentieth century. Edward Said's Orientalism made him a central exhibit: the slave markets and bath scenes are now read as arguments about the East rather than records of it. His technique was never in doubt, and the revaluation since the 1990s has been about what the technique was for. He was also a sculptor in his later years, working in tinted marble and bronze at a time when polychrome sculpture was considered vulgar. His paintings sold enormously well in the United States through the dealer Goupil, who was also his father-in-law and who reproduced them as photogravures on an industrial scale. That distribution is why the images travelled so far beyond the galleries.

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