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Excursion of the Harem
- Women
- Boats
- Waterways
- Egypt
- Nile River
- Black
- Yellow
- Violet
- Mauve
- Academic
"Art Pompier: Anti-Impressionism," Emily Lowe Gallery, Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, Oct. 22 - Dec. 15, 1974. (Exhib. cat. no. 46).
"Treasures from the Chrysler Museum at Norfolk and Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.," Tennessee Fine Arts Center at Cheekwood, Nashville, June 12 - Sept. 5, 1977. (Exhib. cat. no. 34).
"Veronese to Franz Kline: Masterworks from the Chrysler Museum at Norfolk," for the benefit of The Chrysler Museum Art Reference Library, Wildenstein & Co., New York, N. Y., April 13 - May 13, 1978. (Exhib. cat. no. 15).
"Eastern Encounters: Orientalist Painters of the Nineteenth Century," Fine Art Society, London, June 26 - July 28, 1978. (Exhib. cat. no. 109).
"French Salon Paintings from Southern Collections," High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Chrysler Museum, Norfolk; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; and John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota; Jan. 21 - Oct. 23, 1983. (Exhib. cat. no. 34).
"French Paintings from The Chrysler Museum," North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, May 31 - September 14, 1986; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, November 6, 1986 - January 18, 1987. (Exhib. cat. no. 26).
"American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885-1915", The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 10 - July 24, 1994; the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX, August 21 - October 30, 1994; The Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, December 3, 1994 - February 5, 1995; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, March 12 - May 14, 1995. (Exhib. cat. no. 23).
"Homage to Theo van Gogh," Van Gogh Museum, June 24 - September 5, 1999; Musee d'Orsay, September 27, 1999 - January 9, 2000. (Exhib. cat. no. 61).
"Jean-Léon Gérôme: 1824-1904," Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France, October 18, 2010 - January 23, 2011.
French, 1824–1904
Excursion of the Harem, 1869
Oil on canvas
At first glance, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s glassy rendering of Egypt’s fabled Nile River may seem as frozen as an insect trapped in amber. But look again. Gérôme has filled the scene with travelers in motion. While a sultan’s pleasure boat ferries his harem along the river, a camel caravan threads its way along the distant shore and a flock of birds crosses overhead. All the elements are orchestrated perfectly—a consonance of details where, even in motion, everything is put in exactly the right place. One of France’s most admired academic masters, Gérôme prided himself on paintings of extraordinary precision filled with delicate and poetic details.
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. 71.511
French, 1824-1904
Excursion of the Harem, 1869
Oil on canvas, 31" x 53" (78.7 x 134.6 cm)
Signed at left on the stern of the boat:
_J.L. GEROME._
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 71.511
References: Harrison, _CM_, 1986, no. 26; Gerald M. Ackerman, _The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme_, London and New York, 1986, p. 226, no. 188.
Like his colleague Bouguereau (no. 87), Gérôme was a standard-bearer of the French academic style, a conservative grand master who carried the hallowed traditions of Davidian classicism into the second half of the nineteenth century. Like Bouguereau, too, he was one of the most influential artists of his day. For a full forty years (1863-1904) he served as a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where his impeccable professional credentials drew generations of students, many of the Americans, to his atelier.
Gérôme achieved his greatest fame as an interpreter of Orientalist subjects (see nos. 76, 88). In the years after 1853 he traveled repeatedly to North Africa and the Near East - he visited Egypt alone seven times - and he devoted more and more of his art to genre images of Arab life. These works offered a more balanced and realistic portrayal of contemporary Egypt and Arabia than had earlier Romantics like Delacroix (no. 76). However, in the clarity and polish of their brushwork - in their careful crafting of detail and draftsmanly precision - Gérôme's Orientalist pictures remained thoroughly academic.
Gérôme made his earliest tour of Egypt in 1856. He spent half of his eight-month visit in Cairo and the other half navigating the Nile, sketching the fabled waterway and its exotic river traffic. Thereafter the Nile became a favored setting for his Egyptian genre pieces, as can be seen in the well-known _Excursion of the Harem_ of 1869, in which a delicate private pleasure craft ferries a sultan's seraglio along the river. Gérôme exhibited the painting at the Salon of 1869, where it was warmly received. The Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, hoped to buy it but demurred when told its price - 30,000 francs. After viewing the _Excursion_, the critic Théophile Gautier marveled at its atmospheric and luminary subtleties:
The boat slips over the clear transparent water, along the misty shore in a sort of luminous fog which produces a magical effect. The bark seems to float at the same time in the water and in the air....the delicate tones of the "land of light" are rendered by Monsieur Gérôme with absolute fidelity.
A recent cleaning of the painting has once again revealed its luminous palette of mauve and violet hues.
The work must also have appealed to the young American Thomas Eakins, who studied with Gérôme from 1866 to 1869 and whose Philadelphia sculling pictures of the early 1870s owe an obvious debt to Gérôme's _Excursion_ and other Egyptian river scenes.
Jefferson C. Harrison, _The Chrysler Museum Handbook of the European and American Collections: Selected Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings_. Norfolk, VA: The Chrysler Museum, 1991, No. 99, 124.