Pygmalion1.0157c

Jean-Léon Gérôme, "The Artist and His Model", sometimes called "Travail au Marbre (Working in Marble)," ca. 1890, Haggin Museum, Stockton, CA, McKee Room

Gérome's sculpted "Tanagra" is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Click for a vimeo moving image of the Tanagra.

Self-portrait of Gérôme sculpting his Tanagra (1890; Musée d'Orsay) from a living model. In the 1873 excavation of Tanagra in Boeotia a terracotta figure of a girl retaining still paint from antiquity came to light. Gérome and others seized this opportunity to treat the scholastic debate about ancient polychromy in statuary. Gerome's Pygmalion paintings (note painting on back wall) and painted sculpture, as well as this painting and its attendant sculpture are part of the artist's treatment of this matter. The "Tanagra" is a personification of the archaeological site, as the pick-axe near the sculpture's left leg suggests.

See V. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect (Chicago, 2010), figure 17

John Miller, "Some Versions of Pygmalion" in C. Martindale, ed. Ovid Renewed (1988).

M. Reinhold, CJ66 (1971) 316-19

Order Gerald M. Ackerman, The Life and Works of Jean-Léon Gérôme, with a catalogue raisonné (London and New York, 1986).