| GEROME
Government for the abolition of marriage. It was in Gerome's school at
the Beaux-Arts that the present writer imbibed some of those views on art
which will find expression in other parts of this work, and commenced
a friendship, most respectful and retiring on one side, but continually
marked with overtures of assistance and attention from above to below.
The portrait engraved with this notice belongs to the beginning of that
friendship, and exhibits how the professor was sometimes willing to
record, autographically, his kind recognition ofa pupil. "One of the
things," he writes to me more recently, "which in my career of professor
are above all agreeable, is to perceive that if I give myself some trouble,
I am recompensed for it, and more, by the testimonials of sympathy and
scholars."
It would be superfluous to recount in detail the later course of a life
personally prosperous, and rich in progressive and harmonious artistic
development, but uneventful and uninteresting to the general appreciation.
M Gerome has travelled long and far, and his repeated journeys to the
East—Constantinople, Palestine, Egypt, and Arabia—have been especially
fruitful in material for the crowd of interesting works of which our vol-
ume gives but a partial view.
In connection with his picture, "The Duel after the Masked Ball,"
which first drew general attention to the artist in America, his friends
are fond of quoting a humorous and characteristic epigram. In the slang
of the atelier, any startling and eccentric bit of work, varying somewhat
from the artist's traditions, and calculated to revive a perhaps fading
public interest, is called a "pistol-shot." When asked if in his "Duel"
he had meant to make an (esthetic explosion of this sort, he is said to
have answered, "Really can't say,; I don't like noise, you know, so I
thought I would try the sword!"
M Gerome well illustrates the old Latin proverb about the success
of the man who miscuit utile dulci. The world has gone well with him,
as why should it not? An Academician and an officer of the Legion of
Honor, he is a large property-holder as well, with comfortable establish-
ments on the Rue de Bruxelles and on the Boulevard de Clichy, and a
country-house at Bougival. His frank, generous, and simple character
attracts to him the regard and sympathy of all genuine natures. In the
practice of an art of which he is an acknowledged master, the esteem
of personal friends, and the enjoyment of a well-earned competence, his
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