As a religious painter Gérôme has to his credit the _Virgin, Infant Jesus, and St. John_ (1848), a youthful work imitated from Perugino, a _St. George_, in the church of Saint-Georges at Vesoul, a _St. Martin Cutting his Mantle_, in the ancient refectory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, a _Death of St. Jerome_ (1878) at Saint-Séverin, a _Moses on Mt. Sinai_, and _The Plague at Marsailles_, and, most important of all, _Golgotha Consummatum Est_, intensely lugubrious and symbolic in aspect, with Christ and the two thieves appearing, through the desolate atmosphere, like writhing shadows on the cross. This conception cost the author a violent diatribe from Veuillot, while Edmund About, although making certain reservations, wrote on the other side: "The entire sum of qualities that are distinctive of M. Gérôme will be found in this picture." As a painter of exotic life Gérôme remains an observer of the highest order. If he has not wholly revealed Italy to us in his _Guardians of the Herd_ and his _Pifferari_ (1855, 1857), he has at least done so in the case of Egypt, still deeply impregnated with an ancient and splendid civilization, naïve and at the same time venerable, Egypt before the advent of tourists, a luminous land where the Nile and the Desert reign supreme, a land of magnificence and of savagery. Landscapes of this Egypt of poetic mystery, and of Palestine as well, childish or perverse _almas_, rude Albanian Chiefs, Turbaned Turks,--one never wearies of these decorative effects, these clear visions, these scenes of animation, whether violent or delicate, the people, the vegetation, the fabrics, all resplendent under the marvellous sky of the Orient. In the company of this intrepid, venturesome and observant traveller, we witness the passage of _Egyptian Recruits Crossing the Desert_, we are present at _Prayers in the House of an Albanian Chief_, we pause in the _Plain of Thebes_, not far from _Memmon and Sesostris_, and we watch the _Camels at the Drinking Trough_, so admirably realized. Gérôme, who had a gift for finding the right and pleasing phrase, gave this rather neat definition of a camel: "The Ship of the Sea of Sand." Similarly, the _Egyptian Straw-chopper_ (1861, again exhibited in 1867, and purchased by M. Werlé) symbolizes, simply yet forcefully, agricultural Egypt, and all the varied shadings of her pastoral poetry. Then again, there is _The Prisoner_ (1863), in which a boat is making its way along the vast and pacific Nile. Two negro oarsmen, the master, a bashibazouk, are in the prow; and in the stern, beside a buffoon, who apparently derides him, while twanging the strings of a guitar, the prisoner lies cross-wise, fast bound, and abandons himself to his cruel destiny. There, in a setting of enchanted beauty, we have the chief actors in this original drama, in which dream and reality are blended.