La Bacchante 1853

Jean-Léon Gérôme painted this portrait of La Bacchante, a female follower of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and ecstasy, in France during the 19th century. It is important to remember that Gérôme was an academic painter who had achieved enormous success in the official Salon system, so his paintings always carry complex and ambivalent messages. Here, Gérôme adopts the guise of a rebel, depicting a woman freed from social constraints and surrendering to primal urges. Yet her downcast eyes and the exquisitely rendered ram's horns that adorn her head also speak of control. The Bacchantes were, of course, figures that were familiar from classical sculpture and literature, and Gérôme likely drew on such sources to present the image of uncontrolled female passions but within a framework of order and precision. Art historians can look to archival sources and contemporary criticism to understand the many contexts that shape the meaning of a painting like this.