Professor Gülru Çakmak's Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s(Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2017) examines a turning point in French visual culture in the 1850s, when an increasing demand for empirical observation, coupled with a growing sense of an insurmountable distance separating the present from the past, led to the decline of traditional h