La Vérité sortant du puits armée de son martinet pour châtier l'humanité (English: Truth coming from the well armed with her whip to chastise humanity) is an 1896 painting by the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Starting in the mid-1890s, during the final 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.

[1] (Greek ἐτεῇ δὲ οὐδὲν ἴδμεν: ἐν βυθῷ γὰρ ἡ ἀλήθεια, eteêi dè oudèn ídmen: en buthô gàr hē alḗtheia, [literally] "in reality we know nothing; for the truth is in an abyss".)

The Salon catalogue entry for the work included an epigram credited to a fable by Florian: "La Vérité toute nue sortit un jour de son puits; chacun s’enfuyait à sa vue."

[3] An even earlier painting by Paul Baudry, La Verité (c. 1879), depicted naked Truth sitting placidly upon a well, holding a mirror and attended by a nude infant.

[6] It has been assumed that both paintings (like a similar, later work by Édouard Debat-Ponsan) were comments on the Dreyfus affair,[7] but art historian Bernard Tillier argues that Gérôme's images of Truth and the well were part of his ongoing diatribe against Impressionism.