Jean-Léon Gérôme, Portrait of Armand Gérôme

This portrait by Jean-Léon Gérôme is of his younger brother, Claude-Armand. It is related to an almost full-length portrait that was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848 (Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge), and it is possible that it is a preparatory study. Born in 1827, Claude-Armand was 21 when the portrait was painted, but he died of meningitis only two years later.

The Fitzwilliam portrait remained with Gérôme until his own death in 1904 and was presumed lost until it was rediscovered in 2013 and auctioned in France. Until then, the only record of it was a drawing in which Claude-Armand is holding his bicorne hat rather than wearing it. In both painted portraits Claude-Armand is dressed in the uniform of the Ecole Polytechnique, a prestigious school of higher education in Paris that was founded in 1794. In the Fitzwilliam version, Claude-Armand leans against a marble balustrade, his dark olive green and black uniform contrasting with the pale grey stairs behind him. In the smaller portrait, we see a flat dark brown background rather than stairs. Together with his uniform this highlights his pale face.

Both paintings display Gérôme’s skill as a portraitist as he captures the slight droop of Claude-Armand’s left eyelid and perhaps just a hint of youthful arrogance. The smooth application of the paint in thin glazes, the minute attention to details of clothing and Claude-Armand’s cool reserve also recall portraits by Ingres, whom Gérôme greatly admired. There are, for example, similarities between Gérôme’s painting of Claude-Armand’s head and Ingres’s portrait of The Duc d’Orléans. Ingres’s picture of just the duke’s head and shoulders is a later modified copy of an earlier full-length portrait. The copy was painted after the young duke’s premature death in a riding accident in 1842, and it may be that Gérôme painted his smaller portrait of Claude-Armand as a commemorative image of his younger brother following his early death at just 23 rather than as a preparatory study.

Gérôme was awarded a Second Class medal at the Salon of 1848 for the full portrait, an award which helped consolidate his reputation early in his career. In his commentary on the portrait in his review of the Salon, the writer and critic Théophile Gautier noted that there was at first glance something slightly disturbing about it, but that Gérôme’s work had originality and distinction. He concluded, ‘It is not bad that a work has within its beauty something shocking.’