Considered a “masterpiece” by the late Gerald M. Ackerman, renowned expert on Gérôme and author of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, Socrates Seeking Alcibiades at the House of Aspasia marks one of the last works in Gérôme’s Néo-grecor Pompëiste period and one of the earliest examples of his interest in the narrative potential of the odalisque, or reclining female nude. Gérôme’s seamless combination here of archaeological accuracy, historical eclecticism, and creative liberty is, moreover, an important herald of what would become the distinguishing characteristic of his mature art, and what would earn him the enduring title of France’s leading nineteenth-century academic artist. Though best known as an Orientalist artist, Gérôme began his career as a leader of a group of young painters studying in Paris with Charles Gleyre (1808-1874) and Paul Delaroche (1797-1856). Inspired by Greek art and the recent discoveries of frescoes at Pompeii and Herculaneum (sites that Gérôme himself had visited during his extensive international travels), as well as by contemporaries’ love of narrative (laced with a modicum of scandal), these Néo-grecs painted antique genre scenes with a salacious touch and a distinctive, sun-drenched palette. Such subjects were the perfect vehicle for Gérôme to display his lifelong love of drama, theater, gesture, and costume – elements which appear in abundance in this key image – and to indulge his developing and seemingly divergent interests in color, light, and the precise reconstruction of the classical and, later, Eastern world. The esteemed critic Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) praised these qualities when Alcibiades was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1861. (Gérôme exhibited six highly acclaimed paintings at the Salon in this year, making Gautier’s extended consideration of the present work all the more remarkable.) “Such is the title of the second Greek picture of M. Gérôme,” Gautier began, “Alcibiades lounging on a couch beside Aspasia does not appear greatly inclined to follow his master, which can easily be conceived; philosophy is not worth as much as love above all when Aspasia is the inspiration. A young slave, an artful, roguish beauty in transparent drapery, tries to keep back the spouse of Xantippe, and on the threshold of the door an old woman smiles sardonically. In the foreground a magnificent hound stretches himself out - the same dog whose tail Alcibiades cut to furnish matter for Athenian gossips. No specialist in animals could achieve its like. Placed as he is, he gains perhaps too much importance, but the dog of Alcibiades is himself a personage and not an accessory. The background represents an atrium decorated with that antique elegance so well understood by the artist. It is a restoration, in every sense of the word, of an exquisite rarity, and evincing a knowledge that in no wise detracts from the effect. The figures stand out boldly against the architecture, luminous and gay with many colors, in which one can find no fault save perhaps that of too much richness,” (Abécédiare du Salon de 1861, Paris, 1861, pp. 180-2). Two decades later, the critic and art historian Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn] (1837-1886) was still expounding upon Gautier’s words, while also incorporating his own, even more overt appreciation of Gérôme’s sophisticated scholarship and ethnographic skill: “Nothing can be more complete than the completeness with which the painter gratifies [the viewer’s] curiosity. Everything is given – the physiognomies, the costumes, the actions, the furniture, the surroundings – in such an exhaustive manner, that whatever the archeologists may say, by observing the details of the picture one is made to feel quite sufficiently ‘seized and possessed’ of all the information desired,” (Gérôme, A Collection of the Works of J.-L. Gérôme in One Hundred Photogravures, New York, 1881-83, n.p.). The subject of Gérôme’s work was both a familiar and, as these contemporary descriptions suggest, a creatively conceived one. The fifth-century BCE Milesian scholar and philosopher Aspasia, here presented as a fetching Greek odalisque, lays atop Alcibiades, her hand at his breast and her head on his lap. He, wreathed in laurel, reaches out to grasp Socrates’ hand, his eyes averted from her gaze. (The figure of Alcibiades may have been based on Apollo in Raphael’s Parnassus [1511, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City], indicating Gérôme’s eclectic library of references). The pair are shaded by an awning and are surrounded by figures in various states of dress and undress, a polychromed villa in the background. (This was the house that Aspasia shared with Alcibiades’ guardian and her lover, Pericles.) As Alcibiades struggles with the decision at hand – to enter a sober life of scholarship or indulge each of his five senses in the environment that Aspasia has provided for him, with her own body as the climax of the event – an attentive Afghan dog looks intently his way. (Preparatory sketches for this work reveal that the dog was added only later in the artist’s development of the composition.) Its devotion and steadfastness provides a provocative commentary on the scene, and demonstrates, yet again, Gérôme’s consummate skill as both an objective painter of historical and cultural fact and a highly imaginative storyteller. Alcibiades was commissioned in 1861 by the Turkish Sultan Abdülaziz (ruled 1861-76), an enthusiastic patron and practitioner of the arts and a figure Gérôme had become acquainted with during his Middle Eastern travels. Shortly after its completion, it was purchased by the great Ottoman diplomat Khalil Bey (1831-1879) (see Getty Research Institute, Goupil sales ledgers, book 2, no. 833). Gérôme’s provocative subject matter would certainly have appealed to the collector, and found a choice place in his Parisian home: Khalil Bey already owned Ingres’s Turkish Bath (1862-3, Louvre, Paris) and had commissioned one of the nineteenth-century’s most scandalous works, Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), just months before. The popularity of Gérôme’s works among Turkish and Middle Eastern collectors – a phenomenon that continues even more emphatically today – was mirrored by a seemingly insatiable demand among American and European audiences during the artist’s lifetime. Numerous prints of this painting were circulated by the celebrated firm of Goupil & Cie. in an attempt to satisfy Gérôme’s increasingly international clientele; indeed, a year before it was sold to Goupil, reproductions were already being published, in a wide array of formats and at various price points. At least two oil sketches and two preparatory drawings for this work are known, all but one of which is in or on loan to a museum collection. This catalogue note was written by Dr. Emily M. Weeks.