Jean-Léon Gérôme

Knoedler & Co., Paris (1893)
Schweitzer Gallery, Inc., New York
Stuart Pivar, New York (by 1983)
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, February 22, 1989, lot 129, illustrated
Private Collection (acquired at the above sale)
Thence by descent

Lexington, Kentucky, University of Kentucky Art Gallery, Reality, Fantasy and Flesh:  Tradition in Nineteenth Century Art, 1973, no. 42
Hempstead, New York, The Emily Lowe Gallery, Hofstra University, Art Pompier: Anti Impressionism, October 22-December 15, 1974, no. 43
Atlanta, Georgia, The High Museum of Art; Norfolk Virgina, The Chrysler Museum; Raleigh, The North Carolina Museum of Art; Sarasota, Florida, The John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art, French Salon Paintings from Southern Collections, January 21-October 23, 1983, no. 38 (lent by Stuart Pivar, courtesy of the University of Virgina Art Museum, Charlottesville)
Milwaukee Art Museum, 1888: Frederick Leighton and his World, April 8-August 28, 1988, no. 38 (as View into a Ceramic Workshop in Tanagra, lent by Stuart Pivar)

Gerald M. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme with a catalogue raisonné, London, 1986, p. 272, illustrated p. 273
Gerald M. Ackerman, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Monographie révisée, catalogue raisonné mis à jour, Paris, 2000, p. 336, no. 412, illustrated p. 337
Tanagra, mythe et archéologie, exh. cat., Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2004,  p. 50, illustrated p. 53, fig. 22

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This work could be hung in its current condition. The canvas has been lined with a non-wax adhesive. The work seems to be more or less clean and the retouches and varnish are good. Under ultraviolet light, one can see remnants of old varnish on the left side of the work, in the foreground and also in a couple of areas in the center right. One can see that the only real retouches run in a vertical line about 4 inches from the right edge, addressing what may be an old original join in the canvas. There may be old restoration above the head of the figure on the left, but overall the condition seems to be good.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

In the late 1870s, excavators of the Boeotian city of Tanagra uncovered hoards of small, painted terracotta figurines of the Hellenistic period, products of the ancient Greek city’s industry.  The small sculptures met enthusiastic audiences when displayed at Paris’ Exposition Universelle of 1878 alongside Jean-Léon Gérôme’s first major sculpture, completed at the age of 58, The Gladiators (Édouard Papet, “Father Polychrome”: The Sculpture of Jean-Léon Gérôme,” The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme, exh. cat., J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010, p. 302). As the public’s popular interest in the Tanagra figures grew, it seemed to support Gérôme’s own Neo-Grecian aesthetic and interest in reviving ancient sculptural methods (Gerald M. Ackerman, Jean-Léon Gérôme, exh. cat., The Dayton Art Institute, 1972, p. 93). In 1890, Gérôme exhibited a life-size seated, female nude Tanagra (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), colored in similar fashion to the eponymous archeological finds with a figurine of a hoop dancer resting in her hand.  It is this same statuette that is painted by the seated artisan of the present work and seen in multiple versions in the closely related  Sculpturae vitam insufflat pictura (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto) also executed in 1893. The blue-green pigment delicately brushed on the plaster cast matches that of a polychrome and gilded marble of La joueuse de cerceau (Hoop Dancer) produced in 1891 (with bronze and other casts later made by Goupil).  Joining the freshly completed works on the workshop’s table is Gérôme’s blue-cloaked female sculpture of Loïe Fuller (La Dance) set among “authentic” Tanagra figures which wear hats identical to those of the women in the atelier’s background adding an extra element of historical accuracy (Eric M. Zafran, French Salon Paintings from Southern Collections, 1983, p. 116).  These shoppers can choose from a crowded display of polychrome works including two examples by Gérôme that would not be executed until years after the painting’s completion.  The large standing figure with a torch tucked under her arm is the Oracle aux serpents of circa 1899, while sitting on a fluted Corinthian column is one of the artist’s most evocative sculptures Corinthe, a plaster model of which was not completed until 1903 (and sold, Sotheby’s, Paris, June 25, 2008, lot 38, the marble finished by Louis-Émile Décorchemont after the artist’s death in 1904).  By intermingling his own work among the archeological finds, Gérôme links his artistic sensibilities with Antique traditions and at the same time infuses his composition with subtle, ironic humor: the real mixes with the imagined, the past blurs into the present. An accomplished and personal composition, Atelier de Tanagra evidences Gérôme's passion for polychromy, archeological detail, and the realism of his compositions both painted and sculptural (Ackerman, p. 94; Papet, p. 302).