In 1886, some more Nymphs and The Orphan Girl, treated in the same manner as Fabiola, and forming in a certain sense a companion piece.
Then came The Creole, a fascinating woman's head, done in warm flesh tones, amber-tinted, keenly alive; a picture which the State promptly acquired. Then, next in order, Herodiade, a young girl of fifteen, or thereabouts, clad in a clinging scarlet tunic, her black eyes gleaming with a fathomless light.
PLATE VIII.--THE MAGDALEN WITH THE CRUCIFIX
(Petit Palais des Beaux-Arts)
This is a subject which Henner treated several times. The Magdalen here reproduced is, beyond all else, a beautiful and robust creature, whose repentance finds little testimony in her features that are barely clouded by a faint shadow of melancholy. Yet it is difficult to conceive of a more delicious study of a woman.
We need not go further with our catalogue of Henner's works; it would only necessitate a continual repetition of the same praises and monotonous descriptions of pictures that the whole world knows, at least from the engravings of them. Up to the end of his life, the artist continued to make regular and methodical progress; up to the end, his talent preserved its vigour and its youth. It even seems as though in his latest works his light had acquired more transparency, his foliage a more vibrant warmth, his flesh tones a more dazzling splendour.
In the course of time, his success had increased, his reputation had become world-wide. Americans outbid one another for his pictures, and purchased them at fabulous prices. And together with wealth came honours. I mean the only kind of honours that would have been welcomed by this modest and laborious artist, who sought neither the hubbub of vulgar notoriety, nor the glitter of official functions.
But, with his passionate devotion to painting, which had formed the one ideal of his life, he was not displeased to see honour paid, through himself as the medium, to an art that he had constantly striven to practise with the utmost dignity and the profoundest love. With undisguised gladness he accepted the successive decorations bestowed upon him in the Order of the Legion of Honour. And the son of the Bernwiller gardener experienced quite a legitimate pride when the unanimous appreciation of his peers opened the doors of the Institute to him.