Excerpt from Etudes in Modern French Art Go see the drawings by Raphael in the Louvre; see how he attaches his figure together at the knees and shoulders and hips; how careful he is to insist on this continuity of the form; how every bone hangs by a string to some other bone; and how careful he is to express this dragging and weight of the form. I have never seen a drawing by Gerome which did not insist on the same quality of nature. He may violently bend the joint of a figure, but what he insists on is the flow of it, not the break of it. This continuity is one of the great traits of a figure by Gerome; another is, that when the conditions of the picture do not give a chance to tell all the facts about a figure, and when some have to be expressed and others omitted, he expresses the facts of the mechanism of the human frame, so that the figure, however slight, is a viable machine. He has sometimes shown a peculiar reticence in stating the facts about a figure, reducing it to its necessary parts; these slighted or subordinate figures remind me strangely of Egyptian images, and have something of the same dignity; an Egyptian figure always seems to say that the artist was capable of expressing more if he chose, but preferred to hold his tongue; the facts of anatomy seem to be all there, only enclosed in a sort of envelope; and the figure is sure to be not a bundle of limbs, but an unity, depending upon itself from head to foot. This summary treatment, perhaps inspired by his love for Egyptian art, is successfully practiced alone by Gerome among modern painters. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.