The question that you are dealing asks you to think about "What might have caused an older, established, late nineteenth-century, Parisian artist, like Jean-Léon Gérôme to reject new trends in French culture?"

To understand the hostility to new forms of art, you will obviously need to have some understanding of the attitudes towards culture that had been dominant in France before groups like the Impressionists began taking art in very different directions.

Click on the links below to see what artists and critics in the 18th and early 19th century were saying art was supposed to be like and ask yourself these questions:

• What did such artistic conservatives believe great art should be like?
• What did they think would trivialize a work of art?
• What examples of great art from the past would they use as models?
• What made these works seem great to them?