WOMAN IN ART
and colorist, and in competition with other students was to paint "Adam and Eve Finding the Body of Abel." For the figure of Eve he secured as a model a very beautiful young Jewess with a wealth of red-gold hair. The painting gained for him the Prix de Rome, and to that type he adhered ever after—more than forty years, till his name became attached to that shade of red gold.
Painting of the nude was his special study, and twilight his hour for the delicate tints and shadows that made him famous, the hour when things of earth are being folded in the purple mists of evening. He used to say, "In that hour the white pallor of the human body seems to have absorbed all the daylight and to be giving it forth again." Five colors made his palette complete. In the young girl "Spirata," the spiritual maid seems thought-intent on the meaning of life, or listening to deep whispers in her own soul.
Magdalenes, nymphs, reclining maidens, madonnas, or bathers, all furnished opportunity for Henner's skill; whether it was a mural, a portrait, a nude, or a Sappho, equal care was lavished upon his subject.
In the Luxembourg is a picture of unusual charm, an exceptionally beautiful nude. The artist, Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1834-1912), there pictured his ideal of the "Naked Truth," or "La Verite." Truth is pure, so is the standing maiden holding her discriminating mirror before humanity. Light radiates from the luminousness and texture of the flesh so wonderfully painted. The fable has it that Truth emanates from a well, and the background of rocks indicates the nearby depths. Abundant hair falls about her impressive, almost stern face. "The superb figure, in attitude and resolute expression, impresses one with a strong sense of the divinity of a nature that even in all the stolidity and strength of the figure 'might soar but yet remain' to reflect upon a darkened world the light from her mirror."
The female form has been used to impersonate many beauties of nature that are far from the human. An instance, also by Lefebvre, he has called "The Dew." It is a transparency, a figure hardly retaining form as she floats on the mist of the morning as ephemeral as the dew itself, a spirit caught unawares by the Dawn as she scatters o'er leaf and flower the jewels of Day's natal hour.
As woman has been chosen by man to exemplify Truth, let her beware that she portray Truth to all the world she knows. Lefebvre was a young man just returning from his pensionate at Rome when he painted "La Verite," and it seems to have set the criterion for his future in subject, character, and tech-
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