Customer Reviews

La Vie et l'oeuvre de Jean-Leon Gerome (Les Orientalistes, Vol. 4)

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Two of my favoirte paintings in the Minneapolis Art Institute have always been the Rug Market and Young Greeks at the Mosque by Jerome. I have since seen other works in a similar style by other artists working in the Middle East and have become quite enamoured of the intensity of their works. Jerome's Middle East works have the vividness and in-your-face-reality of artists of our own American Southwest, like Reynolds and Remington. The character of the native people, the earthy reality of their lives, the heat and diffuse light of their environment are dipicted masterfully in "Arabs Crossing the Desert". What I found most informative in reading the volume, however, was the incredible variety of subjects, settings and styles chosen by the artist. Because of my own interest in the Middle East, his work there was familiar to me--I have postcard copies of some of his paintings of various buildings in Cairo--but his other work was less so. His animal studies, like "Lioness and her Cubs," and "Thirst" (depicting a male lion drinking the last of a dwindling source of water in a vast desert), and "Tiger and Cubs" are amazing in their detail. The more classical work "Pygmalion and Galatea" with its almost Vermeer like light, and "Venus Rising" a study much like that of Boticceli though derivative have their own unique spirit. The fierce ocean scene "Vision of the Captive of St Helena" has an intensity, a sense that one has happened into a drama just as it is occuring. Quintescentially representative of this awareness of the moment is my favorite of his works, "Duel After the Ball," depicting the death of Harlequin in a snowy mist shouded wood. Certainly a brilliant if not necessarily well known artist. This is probably one of my favorite art books.