There is no one who has not chanced, sooner or later, to pass the window of some picture dealer and find himself irresistibly attracted by a canvas forming a patch of fluid gold, a luminous vapour bathing the white body of a woman, white with that rich, warm whiteness that reveals, through the transparency of the skin, the inner flame, the bounding blood, the pulsing life. Such a picture was a Henner. And when you have come into contact, if only for once, with a work by this incomparable artist, the effect is lasting; you recognize any and all of his works at the first glance, just as you recognize a friend in the street, even before he is near enough for you to distinguish his features. So personal is Henner's manner, and so original his product, that it is impossible to confound him with any other painter, just as no other painter has ever been able or even attempted to imitate a type of which he alone possessed the magic secret. Although the tomb has barely closed above him, Henner has already entered upon his heritage of glory. Or should we not rather say that he had entered upon it during life, and that the unanimity of admiration which always followed him was in the nature of a definitive judgment, which posterity has nothing left to do but ratify? Among the most illustrious of our modern painters, Henner is the one who possesses to the highest degree the art of imprisoning light, of playing with it, of making it vibrate, of using it to illumine the most profound woodland shades, or to set it palpitating over feminine flesh. We must not seek within our own times for any other with whom to compare him; for this we must look backward, far backward, to the period of that glorious Venetian school of which he seems to be a direct product. From Giorgione he derives his warm and living flesh tints; it would seem that Titian had bequeathed to him his profound and powerful mastery of colour; and if Correggio could see the Nymphs and Bathing Women of Henner, he would certainly recognize in them that same velvety delicacy and vaporous lightness with which he himself was wont to envelop his female forms.

In accordance with Henner's favourite formula, the dazzling whiteness of the nymph's body acquires an astonishing relief through contrast with the sombre verdure, yet even the very shadows are penetrated by a warm and vibrant light.

For Henner was, above all else, a painter of women. "It was in the female form that he sought and found perfect Beauty, complete, indisputable, and undisputed, a victorious, compelling Beauty that silences all criticism, all indecision by its multifold splendour, the infinite variety of its complex forms, a Beauty embodied in contrast, harmony, charm, freshness, and grace, but with no element of the merely pretty or fantastic." Henner's women are without affectation, or morbidness, or coquetry, or pretence. They are tall, strong, supple, stately, superb, like the antique type itself. Their beauty is without a flaw. Their flesh is steeped in light, their hair a tissue of living radiance. Such is the clue to their irresistible seductiveness.

It has been said of Henner that he was the painter of blondes. He was more especially the painter of the red-blonde type, for the reason that light, falling upon the ruddy glint of their tresses, awakens flame-like reflections and emphasizes the satiny grain of their skin. This tawny, golden sheen is the most alive, the most vibrant, yet the most unobtrusive of all, and consequently the most harmonious and the most beautiful. But Henner also painted brunettes with an incomparable mastery; to be convinced of this, one needs only to refer to any of the innumerable portraits of dark-haired women that have come from his brush, notably those of Mme. Noetzlin, of Mme. Duchesne-Fournes, of the Comtesse de Jacquemont, and that of Mme. Karakehia which produced such a marked sensation in the Salon of 1876.

While adhering to his own strongly personal manner, Henner nevertheless experimented in the most diverse types of painting, as we shall see in the course of the present study, and he was excellent in all of them, because he brought to them all those masterly qualities which make the greatness of a painter: impeccable line-work, a powerful command of colour, and a perfect knowledge of his art acquired through the constant pursuit of beauty and of truth.