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In 1856, a thirty-two-year-old Salon painter named Jean-Léon Gérôme sailed to Egypt for the first time, and the trip reset his whole career. He had trained under Paul Delaroche and made his name with tidy classical scenes, but Cairo's markets, mosques and desert light gave him a subject French audiences couldn't get enough of, the so-called Orient, painted with the same hard-edged precision he had learned in the Delaroche studio.

He returned to Egypt and the wider region again and again over the following decades, and the resulting paintings, sold as engravings by the thousand through his father-in-law's print house, Goupil & Cie, made him arguably the most famous living painter in the world by 1880, better known internationally than any of the Impressionists working across town in Paris. He taught for over three decades at the École des Beaux-Arts, and his students included Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins and the Ottoman painter and archaeologist Osman Hamdi Bey.

Gérôme spent his last years increasingly hostile to the modern art taking over the Paris he had once dominated. On 10 January 1904, his housekeeper found him dead in the small room beside his studio, having collapsed in front of a portrait of Rembrandt and at the foot of his own painting, Truth.