Durtal knew his pictures, and they had suggested much the same reflections as those aroused by the Benedictine paintings of Beuron.
At first sight Paul Borel's work is neither cheerful nor attractive; the phrases he used might often have made a partisan of the modern smile; and besides, to judge his work fairly it is indispensable to get rid of part of it, to refuse to see anything but that which has evaded the too-familiar formulas of commonplace unction; and then what a spirit of manly fervency, of ardent piety, filled and upheld it.
His most important paintings are buried in the chapel of the Dominican school at Oullins, in a remote corner of the suburbs of Lyons.

Among the ten subjects that decorate the nave, we find Moses Striking the Rock, the Disciples at Emmaus, the Healing of One Possessed, of One Born Blind, and of Tobit; but in spite of the calm energy shown in these frescoes, they are disappointing by reason of their general heaviness and of the sleepy and unwonted effect of colour.

Not till we reach the choir, beyond the communion railing, do we find works of a quite different kind of art, above some magnificent figures of saints of the Order of Friars Preacher, amazing in the power of prayer, the essence of saintliness that they diffuse.
There, too, Durtal had found two large compositions: one of the Virgin bestowing the Rosary on Saint Dominic, and the other of Saint Thomas Aquinas kneeling before an altar on which stands a Crucifix radiating light.

Never since the Middle Ages had monks been so understood and so painted; never had a more impetuous fount of soul been revealed under so stern a casing of features.

Borel was the painter of the Monastic Saints; his art, by nature rather torpid, soared up with them as soon as he tried to paint them.
At Versailles, again, even better perhaps than in the chapel of the Oullins seminary, the sincere and deeply religious work of Borel might be studied.