Truth Leaving the Well (1898)

Édouard Debat-Ponsan: Truth Leaving the Well

Compare this with Gérôme's painting on the same subject. Interesting differences in the treatment of the same subject: in one Truth is a pissed-off dominatrix, and in this one she's an ingenue apparently falling victim to the first men she meets.

Le Flirt (1896)

Edouard Debat-Ponsan: Le Flirt

Le Cardinal Lomenie de Brienne (1896)

Edouard Debat-Ponsan: Le Cardinal Lomenie de Brienne 

admirant les bas reliefs des ponts jumeaux

La Gitane a la Toilette (1896)

Edouard Debat-Ponsan: La Gitane a la Toilette

Edouard Debat-Ponsan (1886)

 Edouard Debat-Ponsan: Corner of a Vineyard, Languedoc

  

Edouard Debat-Ponsan: Preparing the Flower Arrangement

Scene de Hammam (1883)

Edouard Debat-Ponsan: Le Massage. Scene de Hammam

This scene of hammam [a Moroccan steam room, similar to a Turkish bath] illustrates the great orientalist vogue of the nineteenth century. Debat-Ponsan executed this painting just one year after a journey he had made in the East, as is shown by the precision of certain details of his composition. The moment of the massage, here evoked, is a stage of the body care practiced in this type of place. A bather, depicted as a white woman, is lying on a march of gray marble; A black woman half dressed and wearing a sort of turban pulls on her left arm. As in the scenes of the hammam of Gérome, Debat-Ponsan insists on the contrast between the body of the black model which appears tense, rough and muscular, evoking the daily labor, and that of the swimmer with the gentle pattern, the milky skin and To the languid position. It must not be forgotten that this exotic scene is only a clever excuse to paint an erotic nude in all impunity where the white woman assumes an idealized character. [Musée des Augustins]

One Morning Outside the Door of the Louvre (1880)

Edouard Debat-Ponsan: One Morning Outside the Door of the Louvre

Édouard Debat-Ponsan, born in 1847, was an Academic artist, a student (or victim) of Alexander Cabanal. Much of his work is trite Academicism, mythology, nudity for the sake of nudity, and portraits in the category of what modern-day journalism refers to as "puff pieces." Yet in amongst the melange of mediocrity are some surprising hits. His One Morning Outside the Door of the Louvre from 1880 is one such work. It's not history glorified but history stripped naked, cutting to the core of man's inhumanity to man. Debat-Ponsan may actually have been drawing a not-so-subtle reference to the then more recent (1871) Paris Commune and the bloodbath resulting from that. History painting is at its best when it deals, even obliquely, with recent events. [Art Now and Then]