Jean-Léon GEROME (Vesoul, 1824 - Paris, 1904) A shipwreck Canvas. Signed lower left J. L. Gerome. 70.4 x 106.3 cm Exhibition: Cercle de l'Union artistique, 5 rue Boissy-d'Anglas, no. 44 (owned by the artist), 1901. Bibliography: Arsène Alexandre, article in Le Figaro, La Vie artistique section, Monday, February 4, 1901: "?the marine with a shipwrecked boat exhibited by M. Gérôme can be likened to a landscape. There is some analogy, for the subject, but a difference among other things for the setting on canvas with Delacroix's so moving masterpiece in the Louvre museum." This unpublished painting escaped Gerald M. Ackerman's catalog raisonné of the artist, probably because Gérôme unveiled it to the private and select audience of the Cercle de l'Union artistique (1), where he regularly exhibited works since the 1860s, and not to the official salons, where he exhibited more academic compositions throughout his career. While our artist was expected to work on classical and orientalist themes, he showed himself capable of inventing unexpected compositions, far from the reputation of a pompous ar¬tist. Our image is striking in its radicalism, and belongs to a small group of works in which Gérôme stepped outside his comfort zone and his usual subjects, such as his Sign for an Optician (1902), or his Truth Emerging from the Well (1896): "There is indeed, in Gérôme, although often perceived as a reactionary artist, a paradoxical modernity - which stems from the originality of his eye, his skill, at once enhanced and concealed by his academic craft - in creating images, in giving the illusion of truth through artifice and subterfuge" (in L. des Cars, D. de Font-Réaulx, E. Papet. Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904). L'Histoire en spectacle, exhibition catalog, Paris, Musée d'Orsay, 2010, p.18). The dominant emerald-blue-green background is found in several of his paintings, for example in the glazed tiles on the wall of the Snake Charmer at the Ster¬ling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown (1880), or in the bright skies of his depictions of wild animals in the desert. Despite the anachronistic aspect of describing this painter as "modern", the framing effect of the very high sea, the composition strictly divided by the horizon line, is almost abstract. He accentuates this effect with clouds stretched out lengthwise or the parallel lines of wavelets. The immensity of the oily sea is distracted only by the small boat in the lower corner and its angled mast. This is where the drama takes place, for Gérôme never forgets to be a history painter. Gérôme transforms the tradition of pictorial shipwrecks that goes back more than a century, from Joseph Vernet's tempêtes, to Géricault's Radeau de la Méduse of 1819, Delacroix's Barque de Dom Juan, or similar subjects such as Manet's Evasion de Rochefort (1880, Musée d'Orsay). But he places his skiff on a calm sea, not a rough one as in previous artists, eliminating any hint of hope of rescue. The passengers are crowded together; dead or dying, possibly of disease, left adrift on a lifeboat (2). There are no details, no names on their boats to identify these unfortunates, or any specific historical event. Man, isolated in the face of nature, as in Romanticism, yields here to a nihilistic vision of the human condition, to an awareness of his minuscule place in the universe, resonating with contemporary concerns such as boat-people and migrant exile (3). 1. The restricted space of the Cercle de l'Union Artistique, on rue Boissy-d'Anglas, reserved for an elite of bourgeois and major collectors, did not allow for the exhibition of large-scale historical works, and offered sketches or more decorative works for sale. 2. The accumulation of bodies in Ernest Meissonier's La Barricade (circa 1850, Musée du Louvre) comes to mind. 3. Commenting on another painting, Pierre Sérié wrote: "The preci¬sionism of the facture is matched by the absence of image. The drama reaches maximum intensity in the very abo¬lition of its representation... this spectacle is emptiness" (Pierre Sérié, La Peinture d'histoire en France 1860-1900, 2014, p.217).