L’épave: A Jean-Léon Gérôme Painting Rediscovered in a Previously Unknown Collection

Turned against the hearth at the foot of the fireplace, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting found in the apartment of a dealer who plied his trade at the Louvre des Antiquaires in the 1970s and 1980s went unnoticed. L’épave ( The Shipwreck ), which is smaller than the master’s great history pictures (70.4 x 106.3 cm/27.71 x 41.85 in), did not stand out amid over 800 paintings and thousands of drawings that had gradually made the apartment unlivable. Nothing else by Gérôme was found in the eclectic collection, which ranges from 15 th -century German drawings to Italian Surrealist paintings. Various auctions to disperse them are in the planning stages, but L’Épave deserves special attention. Not mentioned in Gerald Ackerman’s painstakingly prepared catalogue raisonné, Gérôme’s signed painting recalls that the artist could turn up where he was least expected, as a mention in art critic Arsène Alexandre’s “ v ie a rtistique” column in Le Figaro on October 4, 1901 attests. Amid the portraits at the Cercle de l’Union artistique…