The Heckscher Museum of Art’s collection spans 500 years with particular emphasis on art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. American landscape painting and work by Long Island artists, past and present, are particular strengths, as is American and European modernism.
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La Chanteuse
Jean Léon Gérôme was among the most successful artists of his day. He specialized in classical genre and Orientalist scenes inspired by his many trips to Egypt and the Near East. Executed with meticulous detail based on careful observation and archaeological research, his paintings gratified a 19th-century taste for romantic images of the exotic. La Chanteuse depicts a dancing girl, or Almeh, in a Moorish interior and relates to many paintings of single figures that the artist executed using props, costumes, photographs, and models in his Paris studio in the 1880s. The textures and patterns of various objects and surfaces are carefully realized, from the transparent gauze of the costume, to the marble columns, inlaid floor, carpet, and tapestry seen in the interior, to the magnificent landscape seen beyond the archway in the background. Yet it is clearly the action of singing with which the artist is concerned; the light falling across the figure and the tilt of her head reveal her taut neck muscles. Gérôme was a passionate proponent of academic training, which promoted a solid foundation in drawing. He taught at the École des Beaux Arts from 1863 until his death, and was popular with American students, including Thomas Eakins.