PIERRE LAFITTE & CIE, PARIS

And when a prominent politician criticised the official curriculum without proposing anything to take its place, it was, according to M. Moreau-Vauthier, again Gérôme who replied: "Gentlemen, it is easier to be an incendiary than a fireman!"

This firmness, however, did not prevent him, so this same biographer points out, from being sensitive to such a degree that he could not bear to watch a cat of Frémiet's preparing to devour a nest of sparrows. He used to bring champagne and dainty viands as presents to his pupils. His humour, so M. Moreau-Vauthier goes on to say, served as a mask to hide his sentiment. Poilpot, to whom Gérôme was destined later to give useful counsels for his panorama of Reischoffen, was working prior to 1870 in his studio. One day he went to show him some drawings. His master, having looked him over, inquired: "So, then, you have no shirt?" "No, patron," he replied, "I never wear any." The next day, Poilpot received a commission for a copy of an official portrait of Napoleon III, together with an advance payment of 600 francs. This pretty anecdote does as much honour to the pride of the one as to the delicacy of the other.

Gérôme sincerely loved the youth, the fantasy, the gaiety of France, and more especially of Paris. One perceives it in reading the sparkling preface which he wrote for M. Miguel Zamacoïs' Articles of Paris, blithely illustrated by M. Guillaume. He was not too proud to appear at costume balls, nor to continue to take an interest in them even after he had ceased to attend them. He once put his name to a picturesque sign for a doll shop in the "Old Paris" exhibit at the Exposition. For an advertisement contest he painted a dog wearing a monocle, with this amusing inscription and play on words, "O pti cien" (0 petit chien, i.e., O little dog). He amused himself by sending to a toy competition, organized by the prefect of police, a little Pompeiian saleswoman holding a basket of various toys, and a diminutive police officer brandishing a white club.

Gérôme had always wished for a sudden and brusque death, "without physic and without night-cap." He was spared both physical and moral decline. At the age of seventy-nine he climbed the stairs, four steps at a time, and sprang upon moving omnibuses running. He died suddenly of a cerebral congestion, on his return from a dinner which he had attended together with his colleagues of the Institut, January 10, 1904.

THE ARTIST'S WORK

It is difficult to enumerate in detail all the works of Gérôme, whose originality and energy were inexhaustible. Only a short time before his death he declared that with the help of the sketches contained in his cupboards he had material enough to keep him busy for twenty-five years longer.

Instead of attempting to draw up a chronological list of his paintings, which would be only approximately correct, even if limited to the more important, it is more profitable to study this conscientious artist under his principal aspects.

Although he made some talented attempts, Gérôme neither was nor wished to be a portrait painter, any more than a painter of modern life. He had, however, as has been pointed out, all the necessary qualities for this type which demands so much precision and assurance. In The Emperor Napoleon III Receiving the Siamese Ambassadors at the Palace of Fontainebleau, now in the museum at Versailles, there are eighty portraits. The artist has represented himself, side by side with Meissonier, and the story is told that a certain general accorded him a sitting of only ten minutes.

Besides the large and somewhat sombre portrait of Rachel, which adorns the Stairway of Artists at the Comédie-Française, and which was painted from existing likenesses and from memory, there is scarcely anything else to cite than the portrait of his brother while a student in the Polytechnic School, a Head of a Woman (1853, at the museum of Nantes), those of M. Leblond, at Vesoul, mentioned by M. Guillaumin, of M. A. T. (1864), of Cléry, the great lawyer, and of Charles Garnier, the celebrated architect of the Opéra.

As a sculptor, Gérôme has left some admirable busts, among others those of Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, bequeathed to the National Museum, of General Cambriels, of Henri Lavoix, the Monument of Paul Baudry destined for La Roche-sur-Yon, and, most important of all, the Equestrian Statue of the Duc d'Aumale, which is now to be seen at Chantilly, and the model for which is at the museum of Besançon.

Gérôme had a sincere and profound love for antiquity; with him it was not the enjoyment of a contemplative mind, a tranquil amateur art, but that of an historian, an archaeologist coupled with the instinct of a dramatist, a psychologue, let us say, who is eager to discover, in any scene whatever, in the graceful or violent gestures of such and such personages of bygone days, some general application. He was certainly most anxious to suggest interesting or amusing parallels to modern life, for, in spite of the dissimilarity of the settings, the tinsels, the decorations, over which the artist laboured with an almost devout care of minute detail, human nature to-day is always more or less close to the human nature of Greece or Rome.

"Exhibit that picture, it will bring you honour," said Paul Delaroche to his pupil, who had shown him, with much misgiving, the Young Greeks Occupied in Cock Fighting. "It shows originality and style." And that was his first success (1847). The grace of the young figures won much admiration. Planche praised the harmony of the composition as a whole. As to Théophile Gautier, he showed himself, as we have already said, highly enthusiastic; he declared that the features of the boy were drawn with extreme subtlety. "As to the cocks," he added, "they are true prodigies of drawing, animation, and colour; neither Snyders, nor Woenic, nor Oudry, nor Desportes, nor Rousseau, nor any of the known animal painters have attained, after twenty years of labour, the perfection which M. Gérôme has reached at the first attempt." Let us note immediately that Gérôme was, as a matter of fact, a very great painter of animals. His dogs, his horses, and his lions are the work of a masterly observer.

Closely following upon the Cock Fight, we must recall Anacreon with Bacchus and Cupid (1848, Toulouse Museum) which Gérôme himself characterized as a "lifeless picture," and which nevertheless earned him a second class medal. Later on he was destined to treat this same subject in marble (Salon of 1881). The polished and somewhat affected grace of Anacreon must have especially pleased the painter, because in 1889 he produced a whole series of compositions of delicious daintiness, entitled Cupid Tipsy. On the same order of ideas, mention must be made of Bacchus and Cupid Intoxicated (1850, Bordeaux Museum), and in addition to these, under the head of what may be called his Hellenic canvases,—in which he succeeded in conjuring