Jean-Léon Gérôme

G. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, London and New York, 1986, p.326, no.S57;
L. des Cars, D. de Font-Reaulx, and E. Papet eds., The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Los Angeles, 2010, cat no. 191.

Jean-Léon Gérôme first exhibited La Joueuse de Boules at the Salon of 1902. The composition depicts a woman in the midst of playing an invented Néo-Grec game in which she attempts to drop balls into the mouths of the grotesque masks at her feet without moving them. While the work was originally carved in marble and tinted with pigments, the artist also executed the composition in polychrome ivory and in bronze. The bronze versions were edited in three sizes by the Siot-Decauville foundry, with the largest measuring 34 1/2 inches tall.