Truth Coming Out of Her Well, painted by Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1896, shows Truth as a naked woman climbing out of a well with a whip in her hand. The full French title says what she came to do: "Truth coming out of the well, armed with her whip, to chastise humanity." She is usually read as furious because people buried her, though Gérôme never said so.
The picture rests on an old saying. The Greek philosopher Democritus is credited with the line that of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well. It was a remark about how little anyone can know. Gérôme gave it a body and a grudge.
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She had already died once. At the Paris Salon of 1895, a year before this canvas, Gérôme showed a different Truth, lying dead at the bottom of the same well. His Latin title said she had been killed by liars and actors. Her mirror still threw flashes of light into the dark water.
A year later he pulled her out and put a whip in her hand where the mirror had been. The picture does not say whom she means to strike.
The one explanation Gérôme put in writing came years afterward, and it is not the one most people expect. Critics have read the canvas as politics, as a duel with a rival school, and as an old man's last stand.
Who first put truth in a well?
Democritus supplied the sentence, and French writers supplied the picture. The poet Florian wrote of Naked Truth, who came out of her well one day.
When the painter Jules-Arsène Garnier sent his own Truth to the Salon of 1883, the catalogue carried that line: La Vérité toute nue sortit un jour de son puits. "Naked Truth came out of her well one day." In Garnier's canvas a nude woman rises from the well while a crowd runs from her.
Around 1879 Paul Baudry had painted a gentler version, now in the Musée d'Orsay. His Truth sits calmly on a well with a mirror in her hand and a naked child beside her. By 1896 the well was a motif any Salon visitor could read, and what Gérôme changed was her mood.
What You'll Discover
Why she carries a whip.
What brought her back.
Which scandal gets the blame.
Where he was found dead.