In spite of the success which attended these first ventures, Gleyre retired from public competition, and spent the rest of his life in quiet devotion to his own artistic ideals, neither seeking the easy applause of the crowd, nor turning his art into a means of aggrandizement; and wealth. After 1845, when he exhibited the Separation of the Apostles, he contributed nothing to the Salon except the Dance of the Bacchantes in 1849. Yet he laboured steadily and was abundantly productive. He had an infinite capacity of taking pains, and when asked by what method he attained to such marvellous perfection of workmanship, he would reply, "En y pensant toujours" ("By always thinking of it"). A long series of years often intervened between the first conception of a piece and its embodiment, and years not unfrequently between the first and the final stage of the embodiment itself. A landscape was apparently finished; even his fellow artists would consider it done; Gleyre alone was conscious that he had not found his sky. Happily for French art this high-toned laboriousness became influential on a large number of Gleyre's younger contemporaries; for when Delaroche gave up his studio of instruction he recommended his pupils to apply to Gleyre, who at once agreed to give them lessons twice a week, and characteristically refused to take any fee or reward. By instinct and principle he was a confirmed celibate: Fortune, talent, health, he had everything; but he was married, was his lamentation over a friend. Though he lived in almost complete retirement from public life, he took a keen interest in politics, and was a voracious reader of political journals. For a time, indeed, under Louis Philippe, his studio had been the rendezvous of a sort of liberal club. To the lastamid all the disasters that befell his countryhe was hopeful of the future, la raison finira bien par avoir raison. It was while on a visit to the Retrospective Exhibition, opened on behalf of the exiles from Alsace and Lorraine, that he died suddenly on the 5th of May 1874. He left unfinished the Earthly Paradise, a noble picture, which Tame has described as a dream of innocence, of happiness and of beauty: Adam and Eve standing in the sublime and joyous landscape of a paradise enclosed in mountains, a worthy counterpart to the Evening.
Among the other productions of his genius are the Deluge, which represents two angels speeding above the desolate earth, from which the destroying waters have just begun to retire, leaving visible behind them the ruin they have wrought; the Battle of the Lemanus, a piece of elaborate design, crowded but not cumbered with figures, and giving fine expression to the movements of the various bands of combatants and fugitives; the Prodigal Son, in which the artist has ventured to add to the parable the new element of mothers love, greeting the repentant youth with a welcome that shows that the mothers heart thinks less of the repentance than of the return; Ruth and Boaz; Ulysses and Nausicaa; Hercules at the feet of Omphale; the Young Athenian, or, as it is popularly called, Sappho; Minerva and the Nymphs; Venus and Adonis; Daphnis and Chloë; and Love and the Parcae. Nor must it be omitted that he left a considerable number of drawings and watercolours, and that we are indebted to him for a number of portraits, among which is the sad face of Ileine, engraved in the Revue des deux mondes for April 1852. In Clement's catalogue of his works there are 683 entries, including sketches and studies.
See Fritz Berthoud in Bibliothique universelle de Genive (1874); Albert de Montet, Did. biographique des Genevois et des Vaudois (1877); and Vie de Charles Gleyre (1877), written by his friend, Charles Clement, and illustrated by 30 plates from his works.
Source: Entry on the artist in the 1911 Edition Encyclopedia.