Portrait of Claude-Armand Gérôme, brother of the artist

Jean-Léon Gérôme's Portrait of Claude-Armand Gérôme, brother of the artist (1848) is an intimate family portrait painted before the young Gérôme had achieved the celebrity that would follow his Salon debut with the Young Greeks Attending a Cock Fight (1846). The portrait reveals a side of Gérôme's practice — direct, unshowy, affectionate — that stands in sharp contrast to the elaborately staged orientalist and mythological scenes that made his name. Painted when the sitter was still a young man, the portrait is now at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, where it is valued as an early example of Gérôme's less familiar capacity for unguarded human observation.

Gérôme applies his already accomplished academic technique to an informal portrait format — three-quarter view, close framing — allowing the figure to fill most of the picture plane. The face is modelled with careful attention to individual character; the handling is smooth but not laboured, and the expression suggests genuine familiarity between painter and subject.