"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.