According to American art critic Earl Shinn, the work was originally painted on silk and was designed as a "transparency to be lowered or raised midway of a long saloon" in La Païva's mansion, "which it was desirable to divide occasionally into two". La Païva, a wealthy French courtesan, later commissioned the painting from Gérôme, intending it for display in the Hôtel de la Païva, her mansion on the Champs-Élysées. įrench writer Prosper Mérimée first proposed the subject of Cleopatra and Caesar in a letter sent to Gérôme in December 1860. To us, Gérôme's nudes seem pornographic, but to contemporaries they were idealized by their removal from contemporary society and their insertion in the Oriental context. Painted erotic subjects with a photographic approach and sensual charge, but avoided 'indecency' by the use of Oriental and historical contexts. According to historian Charles Sowerwine, Gérôme With works informed by his frequent travels throughout the Middle East and visits to Egypt, Gérôme specialized in historical and Orientalist painting and became known as a leader of the Academic art movement. At the age of twenty-three, he came to the attention of the art world at the Salon of 1847 with The Cock Fight (1846), a Neo-Grec painting that was praised by Théophile Gautier. Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) was a nineteenth century French painter and sculptor. The painting was held by California banker Darius Ogden Mills and remained in the Mills family art collection for over a century until it was sold to a private collector in 1990.īackground Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1886 The work is considered a classic example of Egyptomania and was mass-produced by Goupil, allowing it to reach a wide audience. Gérôme's painting is one of the earliest modern depictions of Cleopatra emerging from a carpet in the presence of Julius Caesar, a minor historical inaccuracy that arose out of the translation of a scene from Plutarch's Life of Caesar and the semantic change of the word "carpet" over time. It was exhibited at the Salon of 1866 and the Royal Academy of Arts in 1871. The work was originally commissioned by the French courtesan La Païva, but she was unhappy with the finished painting and returned it to Gérôme. Painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme Cleopatra and CaesarĬleopatra and Caesar (French: Cléopâtre et César), also known as Cleopatra Before Caesar, is an oil on canvas painting by the French Academic artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, completed in 1866.
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