IT was a matter of life and death, a fight for the survival of the standards of French art, so Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) put his foot down and his pen to paper. Vehemently opposed to Gustave Caillebotte’s bequest of Impressionist paintings to the nation, he wrote in Journal des Artistes on April 8, 1894: ‘When the state accepts that sort of muck, then we know we are in the grip of a real moral decline… It’s the end of the country, the end of France.’ He had similarly resisted a retrospective on Édouard Manet in 1883 and would go on to protest against dealer Ambroise Vollard’s decision to hold an exhibition of Cézanne’s work in 1895.
‘Classicists complained the thumb signal had “no warrant in history”’
Gérôme was a professor at the École des Beaux Arts and his stance was indicative of the rift between Academy orthodoxy and the modern painting style pursued by. It had come not only from the supporters of Impressionism—Edgar Degas labelled the older artist’s naked ‘pornographic’—but also from other critics who accused him of superficiality and sensationalism, dismissing his art as little more than a sell-out that titillated the masses. ‘For precision in drawing, for sparkle in touch, for delineation of character, for point and perspicuity in dramatic action, he is scarcely surpassed… But cleverness prostituted to ignoble ends is the pride of demons, not men,’ the lambasted him in 1868.
