Study of Palm Trees

Travel was fundamental to Gérôme’s artistic development and sustenance. In 1843–44 he visited Italy, and in 1853 he made his way to Istanbul. The latter trip instilled a yearning to see Egypt and the Holy Land. Arriving in Cairo on or about December 3, 1855, with a certain Péronnère (perhaps a lawyer) and Deshays (perhaps an artist), Gérôme joined the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi (1834–1904) and the painter Léon Belly (1827–1877). Edouard-Auguste Imer (1820–1881), also a painter, joined them later. Gérôme, Péronnère, and Deshays left Cairo about April 20, 1856, perhaps for Jerusalem.[1] This was to be the first of several visits to Egypt made by Gérôme.

Although the precise location where Gérôme painted Study of Palm Trees is unknown, it was undoubtedly executed from life during the trip. He employed a narrow range of greens and ochre to contrast sunstruck highlights with discrete areas cast in shade, alternating them to denote layers of sharp-edged palm fronds. Gérôme gained renown for the technical finesse of the paintings he produced in his studio; this work attests to the same scrupulous attention to surface detail and texture when he was in the field. The artist was evidently pleased with the results of this plein-air outing because after he returned to Paris he incorporated the trees into the background of Camels at a Watering Place (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 23218), which he exhibited at the Salon of 1857, where he made his debut as an exponent of Middle Eastern, known as Orientalist, subjects, with which he would become strongly identified.[2] Gérôme’s attachment to this particular study can be deduced by his return to it perhaps decades later, when he adapted it once again, this time in the undated painting Caravan Passing an Oasis (location unknown; sale, Sotheby’s, London, April 29, 2025, no. 205).

The Met’s holdings also include a fine portrait study, Assan, a Young Man (2018.208.1), which Gérôme produced in Egypt in 1855–56.

Asher Ethan Miller 2025

[1] See Hueber 1998, pp. 16–17.
[2] The identification with Camels at a Watering Place was made by Fahad Al Fayhani, email to Asher Miller, May 26, 2025 (Department of European Paintings files).

[Galerie Martin du Nord, Paris, until 1984; sold to Shepherd]; [Shepherd Gallery, New York, 1984–85; sold to Lane]; Kenneth Jay Lane, New York (1985–2015)

New York. Shepherd Gallery. "French Nineteenth Century Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Watercolors and Oil Sketches: Recent Acquisitions, Winter Exhibition, 1985," February 13–March 31, 1985, no. 91 (as "Palm Trees in the Mid-East").

French Nineteenth Century Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Watercolors and Oil Sketches: Recent Acquisitions, Winter Exhibition, 1985. Exh. cat., Shepherd Gallery. New York, 1985, unpaginated, no. 91, ill., dates it about 1868, noting that similar landscape studies painted during Gérôme's final trip to Egypt that year are in the Musée Georges Garret, Vesoul.

Fahad Al Fayhani. Email to Asher Miller. May 26, 2025, (in curatorial file), relates this study to the trees depicted in the background of the artist's "Camels at the Watering Place" (1857, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) and suggests a related earlier date for The Met's painting as about 1855–56, during Gérôme's first trip to Egypt (though his first trip began in 1856); notes that the early writer on the artist Fanny Field Hering (1892) identified the palms depicted in the Ottawa picture as "doum palms".