JEAN-LÉON GÉRÔME, French 1824 – 1904 THE PRISONER Oil on panel 43 by 77 cm. Jean-Léon Gérôme (11 May 1824 – 10 January 1904) was a French painter and sculptur in the style now known academicism. His paintings were so widely reproduced that he was ‘arguably the world’s most famous living artist by 1880.’ The range of his oeuvre included historical painting Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits, and other subjects, bringing the academic painting tradition to an artistic climax. He is considered one of the most important painters from this academic period. After 1855, Gérôme went for trips to the eastern Mediterranean. He made it the subject of many of his works. His Orientalist works are quite curious. Drawing on the pictorial and literary imagination of his time, Gérôme invented oriental scenes, using meticulously accurate detail and his open recourse to photographs taken during his trips to disguise his strategy. The Orient that Gérôme depicted was dreamed up by Victor Hugo in 1829 in his poetic work and his ‘authentic’ images at that time confirmed a view of the Orient as a place of sensuality and violence. In 1863, a critic described the sinister excursion on the Nile depicted in: ‘All aspects of the Orient are there - its implacable fatalism, its passive submission, its eternal tranquillity, its brazen insults and its ruthless cruelty’. Gérôme’s ‘accurate’ images seemed even more genuine as they unfailingly recreated the Orient that his contemporaries expected. They brought a stamp of authenticity to this fantasy. Gérôme, however, took many liberties, and few of his works are the result of direct observation. The purported historical, geographical or ethnographic settings in the majority of his paintings do not stand up to close analysis. Gérôme succeeded in painting an image of the Orient that was immutable, untouched, and presented for a western audience. He thus managed to captivate a public that delighted in fixed images of an unchanging ‘elsewhere’. This work is attributed to Jean-Léon Gérôme. PROVENANCE Private collection, United Kingdom