Part 3

In the most recent of these studio pictures, he appears, wearing a sculptor's blouse and occupied in modelling a statuette of a woman. He astonished his friends and admirers, during his last years, by his earnest labours in sculpture. His two groups, _The Gladiators_ and _Anacreon, Bacchus and Cupid_, claimed the attention of the public at the Exposition of 1878; and it was the same with his marble statue of _Omphale_ (1887), his _Tanagra_, his _Dancing Girl_, his bronze _Lion_ (1890, 1891), etc.

His efforts to revive the art of coloured or polychrome sculpture, the so-called chryselephantine sculpture, which invokes the aid of various precious elements, constitute one of the most curious and important artistic experiments of modern times, even though the result did not always come up to the expectation.

On February 2, 1892, in an unpublished letter addressed to M. Germain Bapst, who desired information concerning the artist's experiment, Gérôme wrote: "I have always been struck with a sense of the coldness of statues if, when the work is once finished, it is left in its natural state. I have already made some experiments and am continuing my efforts, for I am anxious to bring before the eyes of the public a few demonstrations that I hope will be conclusive. I know that there are a great many protests. The world always protests against anything which is, I will not merely say new, but even renewed; for it disturbs a good many people in their tranquillity and their routine." And after having first shown that ancient architecture was adorned with colours and that in chryselephantine sculpture the Greeks combined gold, tin, and ivory, that they painted the marble and united it with various metals, Gérôme added: "Shall I succeed? At least I shall have the honour of having made the attempt."

In the interesting study which M. Germain Bapst devoted to this question, after having, as we have seen, consulted the artist himself, he recalled the fact that both in chateaux and in churches the Mediæval statuary was coloured. In Greece, the Minerva Parthenos contained a weight of gold equivalent to more than 2,200,000 francs in the French currency of to-day. The statue of Jupiter at Olympus was partly of ivory and partly of gold.

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the Duc de Luynes undertook, in collaboration with the architect Dubau, to produce an example of chryselephantine sculpture, which cost him more than 500,000 francs and was placed on view at the Exposition Universelle held in the Palais de l'Industrie in 1855.

Gérôme in his turn made a like attempt, in his _Bellona_, in which, to remedy the cold immobility of the material, he coloured both the ivory and the marble and at the same time invoked the aid of silver, bronze, gold, and enamel. He had associated with him several experienced collaborators, such as M. Siot-Decauville, who was to cast the face of Bellona in bronze, Messrs. Moreau-Vauthier and Delacour to point the ivory, M. Gautruche to attend to the verde-antique and the electroplating. Lastly, Gallé, and M. Lalique as well, made a number of trial models for the little head of Medusa.

Among the other examples of Gérôme's sculpture, mention must be made of _The Entrance of Bonaparte into Cairo_ (1897), _Bonaparte_, a bust (1897), _Timour-Lang, the Lion Tamer_ (1898), _Frederick the Great_ (1899), _Washington_ (1901), _The expiring Eagle of Waterloo_, _The Bowlers_ (1902), _Cupid the Metallurgist_, a statue in bronze, _Corinth_, a statue in polychrome marble and bronze (1904).

THE ART OF GÉRÔME

"If you wish to be happy," Gérôme used to say to his pupils, "remain students all your lives." For his own part he applied himself ceaselessly to his studies, trusting nothing to chance. He had an extraordinarily methodical and orderly mind, even in regard to the smallest details. It is related that, when he was absent on his travels, he would notify his models several months in advance, so that they would be on hand to pose for him in his studio, from the very day of his arrival.

Being partly a traditionalist and partly an independent, he did not always possess the gift of pleasing the critics, and he loved them none too well. And when one of them asked him one day for a sketch, he replied, "I do not pay to be applauded." But he was exceedingly strict in his self-criticism. In one of his notes entrusted to his relative Timbal, he wrote: "I am my own severest critic.... I am under no delusion regarding my works."

On the other hand, and it is well to dwell upon this in order to grasp his personality, Gérôme was far from being an eclectic. Of the work of Puvis de Chavannes he said with virulence: "It won't stand analysis, it is a series of mannikins set on the ground all out of plumb, and nothing seems to fit in." And he made a play upon words by employing, in place of Puvis, the Latin word _pulvis_, which signifies dust.

After his appointment as professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, he did his best to have Manet banished from it. He couched his protest in the following energetic terms: "I am certain that Manet was capable of painting good pictures. But he chose to be the apostle of a decadent fashion, the scrap-work school of art. I, for my part, have been chosen by the State to teach the orthography of art to young students.... I do not think it right to offer them as a model the extremely arbitrary and sensational work of a man who, although gifted with rare qualities, did not develop them." In his opinion, it would have been more suitable to exhibit such works in a bar-room than at the Beaux-Arts. M. Coutil relates that Gérôme said further on this same subject: "The first merit a painting should have is to be luminous and alluring in colour, and not dull and obscure."

He had, for that matter, no more tolerance for Millet than for Sisley, Monet, and Pissaro. On one occasion, he assured M. Jules Claretie that if Millet could return and again send his canvases to the Salon, he would refuse them over again! And, when his distinguished interlocutor protested, "Oh, come now, Gérôme, you don't mean that!" he declared unhesitatingly, "I mean just that, and nothing else."

Messrs. Moreau-Vauthier and Dagnan-Bouveret have given some very accurate and useful details regarding his methods of instruction and of work. They have shown him to us at his task, both as painter and professor.

He emphasized the importance of construction, and of the character of the form, rather than the form itself, which is a matter of temperament. He insisted that a scene must be visualized in its completeness, as a harmonious and fully significant whole. Emile Augier, for instance, with whom he felt no annoyance at being compared, the excellent comedian, Got, the younger Dumas, Gounod,--all of these he loved for their absolute clarity, and he demanded it of them. He declared that one has no right to paint off-hand, without a model; and he also held that one has no right to make hasty, careless sketches.

His method was distinguished by its scrupulous and admirable precision. Impeccable order always reigned in his studio. M. Dagnan-Bouveret writes that his palette and brushes were scrupulously cared for. He used to overspread his canvases with a uniform foundation of half-tones more or less warm or cold, using preparations made by Troigras. He roughed in the whole picture very rapidly, and this first rough draft, according to connoisseurs, was always extremely interesting.

In his paintings, he proved that the strength of colouring is in inverse proportion to the intensity of light. He had a marvellous faculty for making the delicate shadings of nature correspond with the psychological sentiments that their aspects evoke. From this comes his amazing variety.

A man of wide reading and deep culture, Gérôme had a profound love for the truth, for reality just as it is, holding that it is the artist's first duty to know his place, his time, his episode, and the one special angle of vision that will give the rarest and most fruitful results.

On the eve of his death, he was still lauding the merits of photography, which has the advantage of being able to snatch a document straight out of life, without falsifying it by giving it a personal interpretation that must always be more or less inaccurate.

Whatever allowance must be made for what we may call the personal equation of an artist, his own individual temperament, it is not unprofitable to recall this opinion of Gérôme's, for it helps us to acquire a better conception of his art, based as it was upon accuracy and unwavering truth.

Truth, which he once depicted in her well, killed by liars and mountebanks (_Mendacibus in histrionibus occisa in puteo jacet alma Veritas_, Salon of 1895), always charmed and inspired him. He rendered it more attractive by his admirable sincerity, by his chivalrous and imaginative spirit, as well as by his archeological and ethnographic learning.

Thanks to this lofty conscientiousness in research, his work, erudite and entertaining at the same time, making distant and vanished civilizations live again, and reproducing atmospheres and local settings with a delicacy that at times is a trifle specious, but always incomparably picturesque, cannot fail to please and charm to-day as it did yesterday, and to-morrow as it does to-day.

Accordingly, it is with good reason that M. Soubies has lauded his fine attention to detail, and that M. Thiebaut-Sisson has summed him up in the following terms: "The artist created his formula for himself. He extracted from it the maximum effect that it contained." And even while we glorify and venerate those painters gifted with a graver or more lyric vision, a bolder or more laboured craftsmanship, we must freely subscribe to the opinion of Edmond About when he said of Gérôme: "He is the subtlest, the most ingenious, the most brilliant ... of his generation."

Transcriber's note:

The following correction have been made:

p. 17 honoured placed among -> placed changed to place

Illustrations were moved to paragraph breaks and a missing comma was added. Everything else has been retained as printed (including ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines). Italics is represented with underscore.