This work was seen as the epitome of the Neo-Grec movement that had formed out of Gleyre's studio (including Henri-Pierre Picou and Jean-Louis Hamon), and was championed by the influential French critic Théophile Gautier, whose review made Gérôme famous and effectively launched his career.

In 1851, he decorated a vase later offered by Emperor Napoleon III of France to Prince Albert, now part of the Royal Collection at St. James's Palace, London.

"[5][6] A considerable down payment enabled Gérôme to travel and research, first in 1853 to Constantinople, together with the actor Edmond Got, and in 1854 to Greece and Turkey and the shores of the Danube, where he was present at a concert of Russian conscripts making music under the threat of a lash.

This became a meeting place for artists, writers and actors, where George Sand entertained the composers: Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms and Gioachino Rossini and the novelists Théophile Gautier and Ivan Turgenev.

To the Universal Exhibition of 1855 he contributed Pifferaro, Shepherd, and The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ, but it was the modest painting Recreation in a Russian Camp that garnered the most attention.

)[11] In his travels, Gérôme collected artefacts and costumes for staging oriental scenes in the studio, and also made oil studies from nature for the backgrounds.

Morituri te Salutant, shown at the Salon of 1859, Gérôme returned to the painting of Classical subjects, but the picture failed to interest the public.

King Candaules (1859) and Phryne Before the Areopagus and Socrates Seeking Alcibiades in the House of Aspasia (both 1861) gave rise to some scandal by reason of the subjects selected by the painter, and inspired bitter attacks by Paul de Saint-Victor and Maxime Du Camp.

Gérôme progressed his students through drawing from antique works, casts and followed by life study with live models generally selected on the basis of their physique, but occasionally for their facial expression in a sequence of exercises known as the academie.

"[15]: 18  Although Gérôme was very demanding of his students, he offered them considerable assistance outside Beaux-Arts, inviting them to his personal studio, making recommendations to the Salon on their behalf, and encouraging them to study with his colleagues.

In the painting, François Leclerc du Tremblay, a Capuchin friar dubbed L'Eminence Grise (the Gray Cardinal), descends the ceremonial staircase immersed in reading the Bible while all others either bow before him or fix their gaze on him.

His first work was a large bronze statue of a gladiator holding his foot on his victim, based on his painting Pollice Verso (1872) and shown to the public at the Universal Exhibition of 1878.

Aware of contemporary experiments of tinting marble (such as by those by John Gibson), he produced Dancer with Three Masks combining movement with color, first exhibited in 1902 and now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen.

Gérôme then began a series of conquerors, wrought in gold, silver and gems: Bonaparte Entering Cairo (1897), Tamerlane (1898), and Frederick the Great (1899).

[3] In 1903 Gérôme executed a two sculpture commission, Metallugical Worker and Metallurgical Science for the American millionaire Charles M. Schwab meant to glorify Steel production.

He organized a public demonstration in his atelier and gave interviews to reporters, including these comments published in the journal L'Éclair: The Institut de France cannot remain still before such a scandal...How can the government dare welcome such a collection of inanities into a museum?

"[4] Beginning in 1890, Gerome again drew inspiration from the ancient world with an interconnected, slyly self-referential series of paintings and sculptures that depicted Pygmalion and Galatea; the spirit of Tanagra; and himself.

In 1890, Gérôme made at least two paintings of the mythical Greek sculptor Pygmalion kissing his statue of Galatea at the very moment she is transformed from marble into living flesh.

"Inspired by his characteristic desire for both archaeological accuracy and realism, Gérôme delicately tinted the skin, hair, lips, and nipples of his Tanagra, causing a sensation at the Salon of 1890.

[3] In this cycle of works, with its exploration of Classical antiquity, creative inspiration, doppelgängers, and female beauty, we see Gérôme "powerfully evoking the continuous interplay between painting and sculpture, reality and artifice, as well as highlighting the inherently theatrical nature of the artist's studio.

"[25] Beginning in the mid-1890s, in the last decade of his life, Gérôme made at least four paintings personifying Truth as a nude woman, either thrown into, at the bottom of, or emerging from a well.

[28] It has been assumed that the painting was a comment on the Dreyfus affair,[29] but art historian Bernard Tillier argues that Gérôme's images of Truth and the well were part of his ongoing diatribe against Impressionism.

[3] Gérôme's legacy lived on through the works of his thousands of students from many countries, including: Odilon Redon, Mary Cassatt, Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin, Stanisław Chlebowski, Ahmed Ali Bey, Henri-Camille Danger[36] and Hosui Yamamoto, and many who traveled to Paris from the United States to study under him, including Thomas Eakins, Edwin Lord Weeks,[37] and Gottardo Piazzoni.

[38] Gérôme's prodigious energy, long career, and wide popularity resulted in an enormous body of work that now resides in museums and private collections around the world; Ackerman's revised catalogue raisonné of 2018 lists approximately 700 paintings and 70 sculptures.

[40]] Despite his prodigious output and enormous transatlantic success, most scholarly articles of recent decades cite Gérôme's work as a noxious blend of the trite, the exploitative and the stultifying academic.

A 2010 essay by art historian Mary G. Morton[41]...points out that, contrary to most twenty- and twenty-first century perspectives...Americans [in the 1800s] found Gérôme's paintings complex, edifying and completely modern.

[42]His well-researched and minutely detailed images of gladiator combats, chariot races, slave markets, and many other subjects from the ancient world created an indelible impression on popular culture.

Gérôme's highly vocal opposition to Impressionism was a losing argument, and his work was relegated to the margins of art history by critics, historians, and museum professionals who believed thathis chosen themes corrupted the loftier purposes of art, thus leading to commercialism...they also objected to his orientalism, which they disparaged for being untrue, a perversion or concoction of the true Orient....Now, with the exhibition at the Getty Museum, and a larger version of the show opening at the Musée d'Orsay in October 2010, Gérôme is finally receiving the attention he deserves.

No longer will he be lost in time, although his paintings, the way he developed them, and his relationship with many of the major issues of artistic creativity in the nineteenth century and beyond will remain controversial.

[49] The most wide-ranging single collection of Gérôme's work may be the several rooms dedicated to displaying his paintings and sculptures at the Musée Georges-Garret in the artist's hometown of Vesoul.