Jean-Leon Gerome has become a popular artist. More and more young people are showing interest in his work and collectors worldwide are hunting down pieces of ever increasing value. This volume is a condensed presentation of his monographs together with a catalogue raisonne."

Catalogue raisonné.

"Gérôme was one of the most famous artists of his day, yet throughout his career he was the object of polemical debate and harsh criticism. Long stigmatized as the embodiment of sterile academicism, he is now considered to be one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth century. Gérôme's interest in Antiquity, his theatrical approach to history painting, and his complex relationships with the Orient and with the new medium of photography all contributed to his highly inventive imagery. Acquired by American collectors at an early date, Gérôme's oeuvre fired the new world's historical imagination and even inspired its favorite medium, the movies. This catalogue traces Gérôme's unique career and features his major works--from history paintings to polychrome sculptures--thereby casting the nineteenth century in a new light."--Page 4 of cover.

An unprecedented reexamination of Gérôme's career and his place in art history.

A crisis in historical representation unfolded in French visual culture in the first half of the nineteenth century, reaching its climax at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855, when artists and critics alike came to a troubling realization: depictions of past heroes that had once held exceptional influence over their viewers now left the public indifferent. This book shows that underneath this crisis was a mounting demand for empirical observation in art, and an emergent modern epistemology that posited the past as foundational and yet inaccessible to the physically and historically specific individual. Since neither the painter nor the viewer could have actually experienced a bygone historical incident as it unfolded, was history painting even feasible in modern times? When historical representation seemed all but impossible to critics and artists of various hues, Gérôme came up with a momentous solution. A small group of paintings constitute the focus of this provocative study on the artist's early work, whose pivotal role in Gérôme's oeuvre as well as in the broader history of modernization of art have been so far unrecognized in art historical scholarship. In these, the artist charted a new roadmap for the art of painting in response to the modern sensibility of history.

Nearly 200 plates from the master teacher's famous 19th-century drawing course comprise drawings of casts, chiefly from antiquity; lithographs in the style of drawings by Renaissance and modern masters; and male nudes. This affordable volume constitutes an essential guide for professional artists, students, art historians, and collectors.