OIL PAINTING: Bathing Scene, 1881
No single figure was more important in the history of nineteenth-century painterly Orientalism than Jean-Leon Gerome. Gerome was a French painter who worked mostly in oil, and was internationally known and massively influential: Gerome taught students from all over Europe and America, and became a celebrity among the French aristocracy. In a period which is known for both the end of neoclassicism and the rise of impressionism, Gerome and his signature style were instantly recognizable: his painterly style was highly realistic, with precisely rendered faces, bodies, buildings, and landscapes, and his paintings had a highly glossy finish which to twentieth- and twenty-first century viewers might seem like photographs; his most commonly rendered subjects were the exoticized, eroticized figures of Orientalism - Bathing Scene, 1881.