Jean-Alexandre-Joseph Falguière, After Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 - 1904)

Overall the condition of the bronze is very good. There is some dirt and wear to the patina consistent with age and handling, with areas of wear to the back and the proper left side of the figure. There is some green-black spotting to the base.
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A decade before Gérôme turned his own hand to sculpture in 1878, he and his brother-in-law - the founder Adolphe Goupil - conceived the idea that the popular painting, Phyrné Before the Areopagus, should be rendered in three dimensions. Goupil commissioned Falguière to model the figure, which he did using not only the painting, but also the many studies produced for it, including Nadar's two photographic prints of the model Marie-Christine Leroux.

The painting depicted the trial of Phyrné, the famously beautiful courtesan of ancient Greece. Accused of profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries, a capitol offence, she was brought before the Athenian judges. At the moment of sentencing, her advocate, the orator Hyperides, swept off the courtesan's clothes, revealing a body so beautiful that the judges were unable to condemn this divine-looking being to death.

Gérôme's painting, exhibited at the Salon in 1861, caused considerable controversy as Phyrné, shielding her face with her arm, seems to shrink from the lascivious gaze of the multitude of male judges. It shocked the art world not only for its indecency, but for its modernity. The realism of Gérôme's nude affronted even the liberal novelist Émile Zola who saw in it 'a modern mistress caught changing into her nightdress'. It was caricatured and parodied in the press, but the painting was a runaway success. The sculptural version, which removes the unsettling reaction of the judges, is not so controversial, but focuses simply on the beauty of the goddess-like nude.

A recent study on Goupil and Gérôme by Florence Rionnet notes that versions of the bronze Phryné with the present square base on raised feet with the Greek catrouche resting on a palm are particularly rare.

RELATED LITERATURE
L. des Cars et. al., The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), exhin. cat., The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2010, pp. 104-109, no. 47