Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s

This book demonstrates that by the 1850s the historical paintings no longer excited the French public. This provocative study reveals Gérôme, typically dismissed as a conservative painter, as a pioneering innovator who responded swiftly to this crisis in art. In a group of experimental paintings in the late 1850s, he devised a quintessentially modern mode of historical representation.