Portrait, Likeness, Type: Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Bashi-Bazouk at Lyme Academy of Fine Arts

Join Lyme Academy of Fine Arts on Saturday, March 7, for a special guest lecture, Portrait, Likeness, Type: Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Bashi-Bazouk, presented by Asher Miller, Curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The lecture will be followed by a brief conversation with Emily M. Weeks, Ph.D., Lyme Academy’s Principal Art Historian, and a preview of Lyme Academy’s newest exhibition, The New Bronze Age: Masterpieces of 19th- and Early 20th-Century Sculpture from the Karlheinz Kronberger Collection. A reception with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres will conclude the evening.

This talk reveals hidden layers of a painting that presents as a convincing depiction of a Black Ottoman mercenary. Its painter, the consummate nineteenth-century French academic artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, employed a model and accessories to stage the composition in his Paris studio. Gérôme had traveled to the Middle East, but what other factors contributed to his process of pictorial invention? And while Bashi-Bazouk is undoubtedly the product of traditional practice, might it have more in common with vanguard painting of its time than meets the eye?

Preview Event
5 pm – Guest lecture, Portrait, Likeness, Type: Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Bashi-Bazouk, with Asher Miller, the Eugene V. Thaw Curator of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Academy’s Cole Studio
6:15 pm – Exhibition Preview & Reception in the Academy’s Chauncey-Stillman Gallery

Event tickets are available online for $100 per guest.
Proceeds from this event support Lyme Academy’s Chauncey-Stillman Exhibition Program and all future Academy exhibitions.