Beginning in the mid-1890s, in the last decade of his life, Gérôme made at least four paintings personifying Truth as a nude woman, either thrown into, at the bottom of, or emerging from a well. The imagery arises from a translation of an aphorism of the philosopher Democritus, "Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well". The nudity of the model may arise from the expression "la vériténue, "the naked truth". At the Champs Elysées Salon of 1895, Gérôme showed a painting entitled Mendacibus et histrionibus occisa in puteo jacet alma Veritas, in which he depicted "naked Truth killed by Falsehood, her body flung into a well and the mirror after her, from which flashes of light are cast as it lightens the dark abyss". At the next Salon in 1896, Gérôme showed Truth Coming Out of Her Well. It has been assumed that both paintings were comments on the Dreyfus affair, but art historian Bernard Tillier argues that Gérôme's images of Truth and the well were part of his ongoing diatribe against Impressionism. In a preface for Émile Bayard's Le Nu Esthétique published in 1902, Gérôme uses the metaphor of Truth and the well to characterize the profound and irreversible influence of photography: Gérôme kept a least one of the paintings. When he died in 1904, "the maid found him dead in the little room next to his atelier, slumped in front of a portrait of Rembrandt and at the foot of his own painting, Truth"—but the source for this anecdote, the biographer Moreau-Vauthier, does not specify which painting of Truth. Since 1978, Truth Coming Out of Her Well has been part of the permanent exhibition at the :fr:Musée Anne-de-Beaujeu|Musée Anne de Beaujeu in Moulins, France. In 2012, after the painting traveled to Los Angeles, Paris and Madrid, the museum featured the exhibition La véritéest au musée, which collected numerous drawings, sketches, and variants made by Gérôme, and by other artists, relating to the painting and its theme. The multiple interpretations of the painting's enigmatic meaning prompted one of the museum's curators to say, "C'est notre Joconde à nous."
