a thorough man of the world and a favoured guest of the Duc d'Aumale, who appreciated his ready wit and bought his After the Masquerade for the sum of 20,000 francs. In 1865 he received from the Beaux-Arts and the Imperial Household an order for The Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors at Fontainebleau.

Gérôme was also numbered among Compiègne's habitual visitors, along with Berlioz, Gustave Doré, Guillaume, Merimée, Viollet-le-Duc, and others. M. Moreau-Vauthier, who with pious zeal has collected the more interesting anecdotes of his life, relates that he had a special gift for organizing charades: he was scene setter and costumer. At Fontainebleau, he took the Empress out alone in a row-boat.

Surrounded by devoted friends, such as Augier, Charles Blanc, Dumas, Clery, his brother-in-law, Frémiet, Gérôme continued his laborious and tranquil life in his vast atelier on the Boulevard de Clichy.

His days were passed in drawing and painting in his canvases. Towards the end of the afternoon he would mount his horse and take a turn in the Bois. He exhibited annually up to the year of the war. After that, he lived in a sort of retirement until 1874, when, after a trip to Algeria with G. Boulanger and Poilpot, he won a medal of honour. A Collaboration, Rex Tibicen (The King Flutist), and His Gray Eminence, exhibited simultaneously, revealed him in full possession of his ingenious and many-sided art.

New and resounding triumphs awaited him at the Exposition Universelle of 1878, where he first revealed himself as a sculptor. As a matter of fact, he had for a long time amused himself at modelling in clay. He used to go to Frémiet's studio to do his modelling, and Frémiet, by way of exchange, would come to paint in his. His two groups, Gladiators and Anacreon, Bacchus and Cupid, won him a second class medal to take its place beside the medal of honour he had previously received for his paintings. That same year, at the age of fifty-four, he was raised to the rank of Commander. Cham expressed the joy of all his friends by writing to him wittily: "I follow the example of your ribbon, I fall upon your neck."

He was yet to gain still further honours: a first class medal as sculptor, in 1881; to be declared Hors Concours (Not entered for Competition) at the Expositions of 1889 and 1900; and to be named Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour.

From 1880 onward, excepting for a few flying visits to Spain and Italy, Gérôme lived at his hotel in Paris, where he kept up a rather lavish establishment, including horses and dogs, up to the time of the successive deaths of his father and his son. It was the latter for whose tomb he carved a touching figure of Grief.

PIERRE LAFITTE & CIE, PARIS

PLATE IV.—POLLICE VERSO

(In a Private Collection, United States)

The scenes from Roman antiquity repeatedly appealed to Gérôme's talent, notably in the case of the Games of the Circus, the dramatic value and brilliant colour of which he fully appreciated. In Pollice Verso, he shows us the victorious gladiator, who, in order to know whether or not he is to despatch his adversary, turns a questioning glance towards the Vestals, who invert their thumbs, decreeing death for the vanquished and gasping opponent.

His studio at Bougival held him for many a long day, while the season lasted. While there, he worked with extraordinary assiduity, barely giving himself time enough to appear among his guests and hastily swallow a few mouthfuls of the mid-day meal. He owned at one time another country house at Coulevon, near Vesoul, but this he sold to one of his former pupils, Muenier. He remained none the less the chief pride of his native town, where, even during the artist's life, there was a street bearing the name of Gérôme.

His favourite summering place, however, was in the heart of Normandy at Saint-Martin, near to Pont-Lévêque, where he possessed a delightful property.

"He is a charming man, of rare integrity and fascination. Very simple, too, like all men of real power, who need not exert themselves in order to prove their strength." It is after this fashion that M. Jules Claretie sums him up in his exquisite study of Contemporary Painters and Sculptors. M. Frédéric Masson, his faithful friend, has drawn the following excellent portrait of Gérôme: "A head firmly set upon a long neck, features vigorously modelled in acute angles, sunken cheeks, complexion bronzed, eyes brilliant and strangely black, moustache obstinate and bristling, hair almost kinky, and sprouting in massive clumps, … a straight nose set in a lean face, … figure exceedingly slender and flexible, waist medium, but well modelled."

Such he appears in his painting of himself as a sculptor in his studio, absorbed, in his alert and perennially youthful old age, by his new task of making polychrome statues. M. Aimé Morot, his son-in-law, has shown him to us in his intimate life, simple, natural, and at one and the same time alert and caustic. We find him also thoroughly alive in the fine bust by Carpeaux and in the medal by Chaplain, now in the Luxembourg.

M. Dagnan-Bouveret saw him under another aspect. In the portrait he has given us, we have the master authoritatively proclaiming his convictions. This distinguished artist, by the way, was formerly a pupil of Gérôme's. One day when he was complimenting the latter upon his method of teaching, Gérôme replied, in his loud, assertive voice: "When I undertake to do a thing, I do it to the very end. I am a man with a sense of duty."

As professor at the École des Beaux-Arts he continued to fulfil his duty for a period of forty years. While conducting his classes he showed himself grave and stern, even sardonic when so inclined. In front of a canvas too thickly coated, he would exclaim: "The paint shop man will be pleased"; or perhaps he would move around to get a side view and then play upon his words, saying: "How that picture stands out!"

He had a good many foreigners in his studio, Spaniards such as La Gandara, Americans like Bridgman and Harrison, and Russians such as the celebrated and courageous Verestschagen who, according to M. Léon Coutil, declared, in speaking of Gérôme, "Next to my dear Skobelof, he is the most resolute man that I have ever met."

Gérôme was frank and unreserved in his opinions. Having become, so to speak, the official representative of French painting, he was exposed to repeated attacks. He did not hesitate to flout unmercifully and to pursue with a veritable hatred such artists as had adopted formulas opposed to his own,—and among them some of the biggest and the ones least open to discussion. M. Besnard, who was not a pupil of his, nevertheless owed him his Prix de Rome.

Many were the circumstances under which he showed his energetic firmness; for example, when the Prince de la Moskowa wished to fix a quarrel on him and prevent him from exhibiting The Death of Mareschal Ney, he evoked this noble declaration from Gérôme: "The painter has his rights as much as the historian."