Jean-Léon Gérôme

RELATED LITERATURE:

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. While the work was originally life-size, 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 smallest measuring 11 inches tall and the largest measuring 34 1/2 inches tall.