| GEROME.
fight, "there was in our art a complete lack of naivete. Chic, or facile
execution, Was in grand vogue when it was accompanied by ease of style,
which was common enough." Rather surprised at the success of the
realistic " Cock-fight,' the painter followed it up with an equally analytic
subject, an "Anacreon"—a "dry, dissected picture," he says gravely—
and, in 1850, with the " Gyneceum," another bit of rigorous truth, really
the first of a series in a now well-known genre, where voluptuous subjects
are treated with a terrible demonstrative coldness, calculated to cast shame
on those who go to them for licentious emotion. This picture was then
accepted and blamed as a merely libertine work, but the author's cynical philosophy in working it out is now better understood, while its license
of topic has unhappily been imitated by a crowd of followers who have
not the painter's pretext of analytic demonstration, nor his scientific ability.
After the " Gyneceum," Gerome attacked the life-size representation
of the human figure; in this line he did a frieze or podium in the Ex-
position of 1852, with figures showing the different nationalities in full
natural scale; also the " Century of Augustus," thirty feet wide, showing
Bossuet's "age of peace, prepared for the advent of Christ," and, says its
author, "resembling the Homer f Ingres in its arrangement, and unluckily in its arrangement alone." It is piquant to find so famously original a style accusing itself of plagiarism. In the same year with this
last (1855), were executed, also life-size, the frescoes of Saint Severin in
Paris, the "Communion of Saint Jerome"—the first of two tributes
offered to his patron saint, and the "Vow of Archbishop Belzunce during
the plague of Marseilles. Their general character is elevated enough,
and the effect does not want originality; but," remarks the painter contritely, "everywhere dry, and even hard. It is a fault I have always
tried to chastise in myself, and yet, if I have succeeded in reducing it, I
have not yet got rid of it entirely." Few artists are capable of writing
these lines of proud self-condemnation. But consider Gerome simply as a
sculptor with the brush, and the fault is hardly a disadvantage. Every
artist must be criticised in the light of the effect he seeks, and it is idle to blame Gounod for not being Wagner, or the architect f the Taj Mahal
for not having made a Westminster.
With these frescoes, and the life-size study for the Dead Caesar, now
in the Corcoran Gallery, concludes the list of paintings in the scale of
nature.
In 1854, Gerome and Got the comedian travelled on the Danube,
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