SPECIAL EVENT
Join us 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.
(The amount of a contribution that is deductible for federal income tax purposes is limited to the amount contributed, reduced by the value of any goods or services provided by the organization. Accordingly, $70 of each ticket is eligible for an income tax deduction. Your receipt serves as your record.)
Asher Miller – Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Asher Miller is Eugene V. Thaw Curator of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he specializes in nineteenth-century art. He was curator of the recent exhibitions The Path of Nature: French Paintings from the Wheelock Whitney Collection, 1785–1850 (2013), Peder Balke: Painter of Northern Light (2017), and Delacroix (2018). Together with colleagues in The Met’s Department of Islamic Art, he is a curator of the forthcoming Met exhibition Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy (June 11, 2026, to February 28, 2027).
Emily M. Weeks Ph.D. – Principal Art Historian
Weeks received her Ph.D. from the Department of the History of Art at Yale University in December 2004. Currently she is an independent art historian and consultant for museums, academic institutions, auction houses, and private collectors in America, Britain, Europe, and the Middle East. She also serves as Principal Lecturer in the Histories of Art at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Dr. Weeks’s areas of expertise include Orientalism and nineteenth-century British and European visual culture; she is also the acknowledged expert on the artist Jean-Léon Gérôme.
Image: Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, Vesoul 1824–1904 Paris), Bashi-Bazouk, 1868–69, oil on canvas, 31 3/4 x 26 in. (80.6 x 66 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 2008 (2008.547.1). For information about usage, please visit the online object page and click on the “OA Public Domain” icon directly beneath the image.
