Jean-Léon Gérôme is a French painter and sculptor, member of the Academy of Fine Arts. Emblematic of academic painting of the Second Empire, he composed orientalist, mythological, historical or religious scenes. He reintroduced polychromy in sculpture. Gérôme achieved great success during his lifetime, so much so that he has his bust in the courtyard of the Institut de France. At the end of his life, the staging of the sculptor at work became a privileged theme for his paintings, for example with Pygmalion and Galatea (1890). His marriage to Marie Goupil, the daughter of one of the great art dealers of the time, Adolphe Goupil, contributed to his commercial success, particularly in the United States, where his father-in-law disseminated photographic reproductions of his work. However, at the end of his life, his fierce hostility towards the Impressionists, whom he considered "the dishonor of French art", contributed to the decline of his popularity, especially in France where the Impressionist movement perhaps most marked the evolution of art, at a time when Paris was somewhat the center of Western art. In France, as a representative artist of the school that preceded Impressionism, he became the symbol of academism. However, thanks to American collectors who bought him during his lifetime, many museums preserve his works in the United States.