The End of the Session

The End of the Session (La Fin de séance) is an 1886 oil painting on canvas by Jean-Léon Gérôme, a self-portrait of the artist in his sculpture studio with his model Emma Dupont; it is in a private collection in Santa Ana, California.

Gérôme had made his debut as a sculptor at the Universal Exposition of 1878, after a long career as a painter of Orientalist and Neo-Grec subjects. In 1886 he was modelling Omphale, the Lydian queen of Greek myth who held Heracles as a slave, borrowing the pose from the Farnese Hercules. Dupont posed nude for the clay model, and the figure was shown at the Salon of 1887; a marble version is now in the Musée Georges-Garret in Vesoul. The same year Gérôme and Dupont posed beside the clay maquette for six photographs by Louis Bonnard, and the art historian Susan Waller suggests the painting may have grown out of one of them.

As often in Gérôme's work, the picture shows not the event itself but its aftermath. The sitting is over: in the lower left corner the painter leans over a bucket, sponging his tools, while Dupont, still undressed, throws damp cloths over the statue so the clay will not dry out. Her pink flesh, seen from behind, is set against the grey clay, which faces us with its head already shrouded. Waller reads this contrast between living body and inert sculpture as Gérôme commenting on his own double career as painter and sculptor. The signature is lettered on the side of a crate used as a step beside the stand.

The canvas is the earliest of a group of painted and photographic studio self-portraits Gérôme made between 1886 and 1902, which continued with his pictures of himself sculpting Tanagra and which scholars have linked to the Pygmalion myth. The paintings were not shown at the Salon, but this one was reproduced as a print by Goupil et Cie. A preparatory drawing for the figure of the model was sold at auction in 2018.