Striking and pathetic contrast is also earnestly striven for and strongly rendered in The Death of Caesar (1859, 1867). One almost needs to be an incomparable "stage manager" in order to show the body of Caesar after this fashion, in the foreground, in the chamber deserted by the Senators; one Conscript Father, as a touch of satire, has fallen asleep. The effect is powerful, even though it has been sought for with too obvious care. Undoubtedly Nadar had the laugh on his side when he compared the body of Caesar to a bundle of linen and called the picture "The Day of the Washerwoman." Gérôme appreciated the humour of this pleasantry. It is equally true that Baudelaire applauded the picture, exclaiming: "Certainly this time M. Gérôme's imagination has outdone itself; it passed through a fortunate crisis when it conceived of Caesar alone, stretched upon the ground before his overturned throne … this terrible epitome tells everything."
The clever erudition of the painter, who had already revealed himself as an adherent of the so-called group of "Pompeiians," in the Gyneceum (1850),—in which we perceive a group of nude women in the court of a house in Herculaneum,—asserts itself once more, coupled with an incisive touch of epigram in Two Augurs Unable to Look at Each Other Without Laughing, and similarly in the Cave Canem, now at Vesoul (in front of a Roman house a slave is playing the role of watch dog), in the Sale of Slaves at Rome (1884), etc.
A similar ingenuity, with greater amplitude, constitutes the charm and the surprise of Cleopatra and Caesar (1886). Cleopatra has had herself brought into Caesar's cabinet in the palace at Alexandria, concealed in a bundle of clothing. "Her appearance there," said Maxime du Camp, who also praised the interest of the accessories, treated with exquisite care, "is perfectly chaste, in spite of her nudity." All the details are executed with a masterly command of picturesqueness and accuracy.
As a religious painter Gérôme has to his credit the Virgin, Infant Jesus, and St. John (1848), a youthful work imitated from Perugino, a St. George, in the church of Saint-Georges at Vesoul, a St. Martin Cutting his Mantle, in the ancient refectory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, a Death of St. Jerome (1878) at Saint-Séverin, a Moses on Mt. Sinai, and The Plague at Marsailles, and, most important of all, Golgotha Consummatum Est, intensely lugubrious and symbolic in aspect, with Christ and the two thieves appearing, through the desolate atmosphere, like writhing shadows on the cross. This conception cost the author a violent diatribe from Veuillot, while Edmund About, although making certain reservations, wrote on the other side: "The entire sum of qualities that are distinctive of M. Gérôme will be found in this picture."
As a painter of exotic life Gérôme remains an observer of the highest order. If he has not wholly revealed Italy to us in his Guardians of the Herd and his Pifferari (1855, 1857), he has at least done so in the case of Egypt, still deeply impregnated with an ancient and splendid civilization, naïve and at the same time venerable, Egypt before the advent of tourists, a luminous land where the Nile and the Desert reign supreme, a land of magnificence and of savagery. Landscapes of this Egypt of poetic mystery, and of Palestine as well, childish or perverse almas, rude Albanian Chiefs, Turbaned Turks,—one never wearies of these decorative effects, these clear visions, these scenes of animation, whether violent or delicate, the people, the vegetation, the fabrics, all resplendent under the marvellous sky of the Orient.
In the company of this intrepid, venturesome and observant traveller, we witness the passage of Egyptian Recruits Crossing the Desert, we are present at Prayers in the House of an Albanian Chief, we pause in the Plain of Thebes, not far from Memmon and Sesostris, and we watch the Camels at the Drinking Trough, so admirably realized. Gérôme, who had a gift for finding the right and pleasing phrase, gave this rather neat definition of a camel: "The Ship of the Sea of Sand."
Similarly, the Egyptian Straw-chopper (1861, again exhibited in 1867, and purchased by M. Werlé) symbolizes, simply yet forcefully, agricultural Egypt, and all the varied shadings of her pastoral poetry. Then again, there is The Prisoner (1863), in which a boat is making its way along the vast and pacific Nile. Two negro oarsmen, the master, a bashibazouk, are in the prow; and in the stern, beside a buffoon, who apparently derides him, while twanging the strings of a guitar, the prisoner lies cross-wise, fast bound, and abandons himself to his cruel destiny. There, in a setting of enchanted beauty, we have the chief actors in this original drama, in which dream and reality are blended.
What a horde of types, some of them bizarre, others simply comic! There are, taking them as they come, a Turkish Butcher in Jerusalem (1863), The Alma (Professional Singing Girl—1864), The Slaves in the Market Place, The Clothing Merchant at Cairo, The Albanians Playing Chess (1867), The Itinerant Merchant at Cairo (1869). Then there is the Promenade of the Harem, and still others, the Santon (Turkish Monk) at the Door of the Mosque and Women at the Bath (1876), the Arab and his Courser and The Return from the Hunt (1878).
PIERRE LAFITTE & CIE, PARIS