Jean-Léon Gérôme

Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) was a French painter and sculptor in a style now known as academicism. By 1880 he was one of world's most famous living artists. His oeuvre included historical paintings, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits, and other subjects. In his painting Jerusalem, he employs a kind of ‘photo realism’. All signs of a personal brush stroke have been smoothed over and extraordinary effort has been put into achieving historical and topographical accuracy. He had actually seen and felt the landscape around Jerusalem on an expansive trek through the Middle East. His strong urge for historical exactitude led him to create an archaeologically reliable reconstruction of the details in his painting. It also resulted in his breaking with the age-old iconographic traditions of Christian imagery. Beginning in the mid-1890s, in the last decade of his life, Gérôme made at least four paintings personifying Truth as a nude woman, at the bottom of or emerging from a well. He seems to have been very concerned about truthfulness in art. Gérôme's images of Truth and the well were part of his ongoing argument against Impressionism.