Der Mensch zwischen Laster und Tugend

In the early 1890s a strain of French painting turned away from everyday life toward dreams, allegory, and moral riddles, and Henri Martin went with it. He showed this enormous canvas, nearly five metres wide, at the Paris Salon of 1892. A naked man stands hesitating in a bare desert. On one side floats a woman in a plain white robe, lit up like a vision of virtue. On the other, a group of women in sheer flowered dresses dance and sing to pull him their way. That same year Martin was among the painters at the first Salon of the Rose and Cross, a mystical society devoted to beauty and the ideal. The French state bought this picture straight off the Salon wall for 400 francs.