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Leaving the Oasis
Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, 1824–1904)
1880s
- Medium
- oil on wood panel
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 67.3 x 98.4 x 9.5 cm (26 1/2 x 38 3/4 x 3 3/4 in.); Unframed: 50 x 81.2 cm (19 11/16 x 31 15/16 in.)
- Culture
- France, 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Noah L. Butkin
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Leaving the Oasis repeats several themes in Gérôme's art—camel caravans, oases, and expansive desert landscapes. As an academic realist, Gérôme painted everyday scenes in a meticulous and polished style. Here he carefully rendered the unique forms of the figures' dress and the camels' physical features, as well as the colors of the changing sky and the violet shadows cast by the airborne dogs and the legs of the camels. Although the picture's smoothness and detail suggest a photographic image, Gérôme actually composed his paintings in the studio, basing them on memories and sketches from his visits to the Near East. Following his first trip to Egypt in 1856, he developed into a major figure among 19th-century "Orientalists"—artists who specialized in representing Near Eastern life, culture, and landscapes.
