Jean-Léon Gérôme

signed JL GEROME and stamped on the reverse SIOT DECAUVILLE / FONDEUR / PARIS and numbered E143. 

G. M. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Paris, 1986, no. S. 43 B

Overall in good original condition with the usual wear to patina in places, especially to the top of head, arms and legs consistent with handling and touching. Light scratches and dents consistent with age. There is one dent to the front of the woman's head-drape.
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Known primarily as a painter, Jean-Léon Gérôme exhibited his first sculpture at the Salon of 1878 at the age of 54. An important influence on his enormously successful career as a painter had been his fascination with Antiquity. During an early stay in Rome with his teacher, the painter Delaroche, Gérôme felt inspired by Antique sculpture, leading to a commission from the French Government for the Paris 1855 Exposition Universelle. Gérôme chose an ambitious allegorical subject, The Age of Augustus (present location unknown), depicting the world at peace under the Roman Emperor. With the advance for the work (Gérôme was ultimately paid 20,000 francs, or about $70,000 today), the artist traveled to Russia and the Balkans, searching for various ethnic models to include in his composition. The rest of the payment, made in 1856, would finance Gérôme's first trip to Egypt - a journey that would have a profound effect on his career.

From 1856 forward, Gérôme submitted Orientalist pictures to the Paris Salon des Artistes Français, along with the society portraits and historical genre scenes audiences had come to expect. Impressively, given this breadth of subject, approximately a third of Gérôme's finished paintings depict Orientalist themes. In his capacity as a professor for nearly 40 years at the École des Beaux-Arts, Gérôme influenced many of his students to travel to the Middle East, and his new, "documentary" style of painting would establish itself as the definitive model for Orientalist painting in the second half of the 19th century. Gérôme's own sketching expeditions to Egypt would continue through the 1860s and 1870s; other destinations included Turkey, Spain, Algiers, Syria, and Palestine. In 1897 Gérome presented to the Paris Salon a painting titled La Fuite en Egypte (see Ackerman no. 439), from which a plaster figure of the present model representing Marie, resembling a Bedouin woman, holding the infant Jesus flee to Egypt.

Indeed, Gérôme did not take up sculpture until late in his career. It seems that the firm of Goupil first adapted his work as sculpture, mindful of the contemporary vogue for small bronzes and aware of the commercial appeal of his major Salon paintings. He was encouraged by the sculptor Frémiet and described himself as his pupil in the catalogue of the Salon for 1901. Much has been made of the development of the use of color in sculpture in the 19th century, and Gérôme was particularly fascinated by it. Philip Ward-Jackson in the catalogue of the exhibition The Colour of Sculpture, refers specifically to the exceptional patinas achieved by the Siot-Decauville foundry, of which the present lot is a vivid example.