In _The Fountain_ we behold a woman, beautiful with the beauty of red gold, like all of Henner's women. She is resting her hand upon the margin of a well, and seems to be gazing at her own reflection in the water. This same Salon also includes _Andromeda in Chains_, which belongs to-day to Mme. Raffalowitz. From time to time Henner reverted to religious paintings, for which, after the fashion of the great masters of the past, he always retained a marked fondness. Thus it happened that he exhibited at the Salon of 1881 a _St. Jerome_, a subject all the more venturesome to paint because many of the most illustrious artists, such as Dürer, Tintoretto, and Veronese, had treated it before him. Yet Henner might well challenge comparison with these redoubtable predecessors, and this picture, now in the Luxembourg, is numbered among his best. _The Spring_, which figured at the same Salon, inevitably challenges comparison with the same subject formerly treated by Ingres. Employing wholly different means, Henner achieved the same degree of perfection as that attained by the illustrious author of _The Odalisque_. In Ingres' picture of _The Spring_, the flesh of the young girl has the freshness of some delicate and fragile fruit; in that of Henner's, it has the velvety savour of a fruit that is fully ripe. Both paintings show the same masterly science of line-work, the same impeccable sureness of execution, and also the same profound sense of virginal chastity in the nude. Henner's _Spring_ was purchased by an American for eleven thousand dollars (55,000 francs). This is one of the highest prices ever paid for the work of a living painter. In 1882 came _Bara_, of which we give a reproduction in the present volume, and which is now to be seen in the Petit Palais. This was still another subject which had been previously treated, and by no less a master than David! Both painters were equally felicitous in rendering the charming youthfulness of the small hero who fell so gloriously for his country. A comparison of the two works is all the more pleasurable because one discovers that, however dissimilar they may be, they express the same appreciation of classic beauty and the same reverence for form. In 1883 we have _The Woman Reading_, a dazzling poem in blond flesh that brings to mind Correggio's _Magdalen Reading_, now contained in the Munich collection. In contrast with the opulence of the above portrait, we have next a countenance of remarkable gentleness, ideal in its expression of purity, in the picture entitled _The Nun_. She is quite young and quite fair, and she is kneeling upon the pavement in prayer, while her pale girlish face emerges from the sombre frame of her black garb, like an immaculate lily overgrown with weeds. This time Henner had surpassed himself; he had interpreted with inimitable strokes the beauty of renunciation and the purity of an ecstatic life. This Salon was one of the most glorious that the great artist ever knew.