How does this artwork elucidate its History?
The painting is a large work—"remarkable for its dimensions, the figures being nearly life size"—measuring 290 cm × 430 cm, and is painted in bright, highly contrasting colours. It was painted by Brouillet at the age of thirty from individual studies made of the thirty participants, and presented in the prevailing tradition of academic group portraits. It was first displayed (with favourable notices) at the salon d'art of 1 May 1887, and later purchased by the Académie des Beaux-Arts for 3,000 francs.Brouillet was a pupil of the academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme who was, himself, also renowned for the fact that his paintings, such as Phryne before the Areopagus (1861), were so popular as prints that it seemed they were "painted in order to be reproduced."
Académie des Beaux-Arts right Phryne before the Areopagus Jean-Léon Gérôme