In the course of time, his success had increased, his reputation had become world-wide. Americans outbid one another for his pictures, and purchased them at fabulous prices. And together with wealth came honours. I mean the only kind of honours that would have been welcomed by this modest and laborious artist, who sought neither the hubbub of vulgar notoriety, nor the glitter of official functions.
But, with his passionate devotion to painting, which had formed the one ideal of his life, he was not displeased to see honour paid, through himself as the medium, to an art that he had constantly striven to practise with the utmost dignity and the profoundest love. With undisguised gladness he accepted the successive decorations bestowed upon him in the Order of the Legion of Honour. And the son of the Bernwiller gardener experienced quite a legitimate pride when the unanimous appreciation of his peers opened the doors of the Institute to him.
It is impossible to speak of Henner, and yet pass over in silence his success as a portrait painter, in which capacity he was equal, if not superior, to the painter of nymphs and Magdalens.
In his portrait work Henner was first of all the portrayer of women, as indeed, throughout his life, he had been in all his paintings.
There was no dearth of models. They came to him in throngs, and his studio in the Place Pigalle witnessed a procession of the most magnificent beauties of France and the world at large. Henner, however, was never a flattering portrait painter, nor even a complaisant one. He had too much respect for himself and for his art to trade upon his professional integrity; he was too fervent a worshipper of nature to distort it, or even to paraphrase it. His portraits are literally portraits, in the highest sense of the word; I mean that they are faithful copies of the person represented, and that no trace of adulation could be found in a single one of them. But he excelled in extracting from the physiognomy of his model that one intimate note which each one of us conceals within himself, and that is now and then betrayed upon our features in a fugitive yet unmistakable gleam. It is this hidden note, this inner flame, this latent nobility, this moral beauty which Henner had the peculiar gift of divining and interpreting.