An opéra-comique after an easel painting

Does our reader know Phryne? Probably not, and Saint-Saëns’s contemporaries would certainly have said the same thing, if a successful painter of the Second Empire had not made Phryne a commonplace. That painter was Jean-Léon Gérôme. His canvas is entitled Phryné devant l’aréopage (Phryne before the Areopagus) and, at the time, everyone knew it. The public had crowded around it at the 1861 Salon. They were able to see it a second time at the Exposition Universelle of 1867, but that was all, because a collector had bought it for a small fortune. It hardly mattered, though, because in the absence of the original, the reproduction of works of art by engraving, printing and then photography had made the picture available to everyone. It could be found in the illustrated press, in books or, as an object in its own right, in the form of engravings and photographs. Goupil, Gérôme’s dealer, had even commissioned a young sculptor to produce a version of Phryne in the round, stripped of her clothes. This time the copy had an advantage over the original: the viewer could walk around it and examine Phryne from all angles.