Jean Leon Gerome biography and description of his painting style

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Jean Leon Gerome

1824-1904

French Academic Historical Genre Painter

Stylistically influenced by the following painters - Paul Delaroche, Adolphe-William Bouguereau, Pierre-Auguste Cot, and Eugene Fromentin

Education - studied under Paul Delaroche and later Charles Gleyre.

Cause of Death - Heart Attack

John C. Van Dyke, art historian and artists describes the painter and his style "Gérôme is a man of classic training and inclination, but his versatility hardly allows him to be classified anywhere. He was first a leader of the New-Greeks, painting delicate mythological subjects; then a historical painter, showing deaths of Cæsar and the like; then an Orientalist, giving scenes from Cairo and Constantinople; then a genre painter, depicting contemporary subjects in the many lands through which he has travelled. Whatever he has done shows semi-classic drawing, ethnological and archæological knowledge, Parisian technic, and exact detail. His travels have not changed his precise scientific point of view. He is a true academician at bottom, but a more versatile and cultured painter than either Cabanel or Bouguereau. He draws well, sometimes uses color well, and is an excellent painter of textures. A man of great learning in many departments he is no painter to be sneered at, and yet not a painter to make the pulse beat faster or to arouse the æsthetic emotions. His work is impersonal, objective fact, showing a brilliant exterior but inwardly devoid of feeling."

Description of Jean Leon Gerome's Academic Classicism Painting style
Followers of this movement were influenced by the high standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, which practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Academic Classicism attempted to merge both techniques to create the perfect style. It is characterized by adhering to a strict manner of painting, following narrow compositional rules and delicacy of color. The atmospheric effects are sumptuously luminescent. According to art historian, Walter Pater "To produce such effects at all requires all the resources of painting, with its power of indirect expression, of subordinate but significant detail, its atmosphere, its foregrounds and backgrounds."

About the Painter

Gerome did not embrace the Impressionist movement to say the least. He could not understand why collectors were purchasing their paintings. He organized loud public demonstrations against the art movement and gave scathing interviews to reporters. Over time Gerome poisonous vendetta against the modern art movement wore him down. He died of heart failure before he could go on an extended trip to Monte Carlo.

Associated Painters

Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, 1817-1900

Adolphe-William Bouguereau1825-1905

Charles Emile August Carolus-Duran, 1837-1917

Leon Francois Comerre, 1850-1916

Pierre-Auguste Cot 1837-1883

Thomas Couture, 1815-1879

Paul Delaroche 1797-1856

Eugene Fromentin, 1820-1876

Jean Leon Gerome, 1824-1904

Jean-Paul Laurens1838-1921

Adolphe Alexandre Lesrel, 1839-1929

Luc Olivier Merson, 1846-1920

Hans Makart, 1840 - 1884

Giulio Rosati, 1858-1917

Franz Xavier Winterhalter, 1805-1873

William Clarke Wontner, 1857-1930

Fritz Zuber-Buhler, 1822-1896

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