Focus on Tanagra (Gérôme sculpture) and discuss the Gérôme paints himself sculpting Tanagra, twice.
In 1894 and 1890, Gérôme painted two versions of a self-portrait depicting the artist at work in his atelier: The Artist and His Model (now at the Haggin Museum) and Working in Marble (Dahesh Museum of Art). The self-portraits are very similar, but differ in at least one significant respect.
In these self-portraits Gérôme is seen sculpting Tanagra from a live model who holds the seated, stiffly upright pose, though her upturned palm is empty. Behind the model on its own stand is a large polychrome Hoop Dancer statuette of the sort Gérôme made for sale to the public. Various props litter the studio. In each painting, hanging on the wall in the background, is a painting by Gérôme of Pygmalion and Galatea, another of his works inspired by the ancient world (and made the same year as Tanagra). The self-portraits depict a real sculptor (Gérôme) bringing life to a statue by copying a living woman; the Pygmalion paintings depict a mythical sculptor whose statue is becoming a living woman.			
			
		
The doppelgängers and visual puns are complex, because the Pygmalion paintings in the two backgrounds are similar but not identical. Just as Gérôme painted two self-portraits, he also painted more than one version of Pygmalion and Galatea. The most famous, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows the kissing sculptor and statue from behind; it appears in the background of The Artist and His Model. But Gérôme painted at least one variant (now in a private collection), in which Pygmalion and Galatea are seen kissing from the front. This version appears in Working in Marble.In both self-portraits, a variant of Pygmalion and Galatea is depicted as a painting of a mythical sculptor and living statue within a painting of a real sculptor, a living model, and (despite appearances) a plaster (not marble) statue.Like most 19th-century sculptors, Gérôme did not carve the marble himself but furnished professional marble cutters with a full-size plaster to use as a guide. It is this intermediate step that is depicted in Working in Marble, a title that refers to the overall creative process. Gérôme portrays himself on a turn stand putting the finishing touches on the plaster version of Tanagra, carefully judging the accuracy of his work against the live model.
This complex self-portrait is "a summation of Gérôme’s remarkable career as both painter and sculptor." As in all his works connected to Tanagra, we see Gérôme "powerfully evoking the continuous interplay between painting and sculpture, reality and artifice, as well as highlighting the inherently theatrical nature of the artist’s studio."The Haggin Museum also has a bronze Hoop Dancer by Gérôme, displayed beside The Artist and His Model.
The original Tanagra resides at the Musée d'Orsay (fiche oeuvre 15298). A 29.5-inch-high, gilded bronze version of Tanagra by Gérôme is held by the Phoenix Art Museum (object 1986.54), which also has a gilded bronze Hoop Dancer (object 2000.12). More gilded bronze versions of Tanagra exist; one was auctioned in 2011 by Sotheby's for 150,000 GBP, another in 2017 by  for $50,000.
Musée d'Orsay doppelgängers Galatea Phoenix Art Museum Tanagra Haggin Museum Pygmalion and Galatea Sotheby's Pygmalion Dahesh Museum of Art Metropolitan Museum of Art