Jean Leon Gerome was a famous French painter and sculptor during the 19th century. He was known for his beautifully detailed paintings of the many places he traveled, from Egypt, the Mediterranean and Asia. His style of painting was a combination of Neoclassicism and Romanticism that where vibrant figurative depictions of his travels. Art historians label his artistic expression as Academicism and Oriental because he had a French standardized way of painting ornate foreign everyday life. The compelling piece I chose is The Bath by Jean-Lon Gerome (1880-1885). This oil on canvas painting beautifully reveals his experiences traveling, the social views of this time and a realistic but glamorized depiction of foreign countries.
Many of Gerome’s paintings where romanticized, which made his artwork extremely pleasing to the eye and the imagination. First, the scene in The Bath is of two women in a beautiful bathing chamber. The woman being bathed looks European and the woman doing the bathing is an Algerian women. The European woman’s back is to the viewer with her face cast down with modesty. While the Algerian woman is facing forward with her chest bare, dressed in beautiful clothing and jewelry…show more content… Foreigners began to be painted more often during this time in submissive and dominant roles. In this painting (and many of Gerome’s paintings of foreign woman) the Algerian woman is shown in submissive action of bathing the western woman, but it still reveals a turn of diversity in France. After slavery was abolished in the last French colonized country in 1804, people of color began to show up in western art, which changed the boundaries of art for the better. This is the main reason I chose this piece of art because it was the first painting I saw in the Legion of Honor with a woman of color. This intrigued me because it makes a monumental statement to the change of social events in