The Harem boat trip

Description of the artwork

Our painting is the first version of the one exhibited at the Salon des Beaux-Arts de France in 1869, entitled Excursion du Harem. It is now in the Chrystler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, and was included in the major Gérôme exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris a few years ago (catalog raisonné Ackerman p 89). Only a few details change in the composition of these two works, in particular the light, which appears to be dusk in the Norfolk painting instead of dawn in ours.
In 1856, Gérôme 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. »

Origin

Jean Léon Gérôme Collection by descent

Literature

Catalogue raisonné Jean Léon Gérôme de Gerald M.Ackerman ACR EDITION reproduit p 89