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
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