Although orphaned at the age of fourteen, Gustave Rodolphe Boulanger, of Creole ancestry, had many oppor-tunities to study painting and to travel, going to Algeria for the first time in 1845. He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1846 after studying with the masters Pierre Jules Jollivet (1754-1871) and Delaroche (q.v.). Only three years later he won the Grand Prix de Rome, and his extended stay in Italy from 1850 to 1856 overlapped those of the classicizing painters Paul Baudry (1828-1886), Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889), and Bouguereau (q.v.), as well as the architect Charles Garnier (1825-1898), who later engaged him to decorate the Paris Opéra. He practiced a neoclassical style that he used for classical as well as orientalist subjects. He made his name with a painting for the prince Napoléon (the emperor's brother), The Rehearsal of "The Flute Player" at the Home of the Prince Napoléon (1861, Musée National du Château et de Trianon, Versailles), representing the Pompeian interior of his residence in Paris that Boulanger's friend Gérôme decorated. Boulanger also undertook mural decoration in Paris for the mairie (city hall) of the thirteenth arrondissement as well as the foyer of the new opera house by Garnier.
In 1882 he was elected to the Institut, and he became head of a painting atelier in the École in 1885. In the early 1880s he published a pamphlet entitled To Our Students in which his conservative and elitist attitudes toward art allowed him to identify concretely the new trends in modern painting, "the search for originality," "the too widely spread and accessible expositions," and the respect for form replaced by "the interest . . . [in] the accident of form."1 Boulanger remained close to Gérôme. These two artists had greater success than the other Neo-grecs; they shared an interest in orientalist subjects (they made a trip together to the Middle East in 1872); and they belonged to the Institut and École. The year of Boulanger's death, art historian C. H. Stranahan called him "Gérôme's 'alter ego.' "2
1. Gustave Boulanger, A nos élèves (Paris, n.d.), 4-5. It is interesting that the pamphlet was published by Lahure at 9 Rue de Fleurus, just a few doors down from the Neo-grecs' former headquarters in Gérôme's studio.
2. C. H. Stranahan, A History of French Painting (New York, 1895), 319.
