Octave Tassaert style falls somewhere between Romanticism
and Realism. This “Correggio of the garret,” as Theophile Gautier called him,
ended up committing suicide. He loved women, lived in poverty and his art and
life were one. His favorite subjects were borrowed from the “frolicsome genre,”
as he called it, or else were sentimental, mawkish genre scene. Tassaert
returned more than once to other very Flaubertian subject of the temptation of
San Anthony and his disciple Saint Hillarion, the anchorite from Gaza who
founded Palestinian monasticism. The artist bring together iconography elements
he was drawn to, counterbalancing the starving saint with the cloud of
delectable female flesh.