Truth Coming Out of Her Well

Gerome painted this in 1896, near the end of his life, and he was a man with a grievance. The old story went that truth lives at the bottom of a well, and here she climbs out of it naked and furious, a whip raised to punish a lying world. Gerome had spent years attacking the Impressionists as frauds, and many read the picture as part of that quarrel. He also tied the image to photography, saying it was thanks to the camera that truth had finally left the well for good. A curator at the small museum in Moulins that owns it once called this their answer to the Mona Lisa.