Lot Essay
This recent rediscovery is among the earliest identified paintings by the young Jean-Leon Gérôme and perhaps the most unique, painted when the artist was only 21 years old. It was a formative moment in Gérôme’s career. Having left the studio of Paul Delaroche and made the obligatory trip to Italy, Gérôme entered the studio of Charles Gleyre and would begin the work that would set the course of his accomplished career. It was only a year after the present painting, in 1846, that Gérôme would paint Le Combat de coqs, the first painting to earn him recognition at the Salon. A multipotentialite of the highest order, Gérôme’s interests, creativity and keen mind found expression in his eclectic subject matter, even at this early moment of his career.
Though best remembered as a neoclassicist and Orientalist painter, Gérôme’s interests as an artist refused to be bound by any school or subject. A voracious traveler, he drew often on his trips in North Africa and the Holy Land for his subject matter, though he drew from mythology, the Bible, French history, and contemporary life as well. But Gérôme’s imagination could be sparked just as easily by places he would never visit, as in the case of La Chasse aux lions chez les Indiens.
In the case of the present picture, that spark came from the arrival of the American artist George Catlin in Paris in 1845, where he had come to exhibit his Indian Gallery, now a part of the Smithsonian Collection. Caitlin was the first artist to travel west of the Mississippi to paint both portraits and scenes of everyday life among the Native American Tribes, turning his back on his previous life in Philadelphia, where he had been a successful lawyer and a miniaturist. ‘If my life be spared, nothing shall stop me from visiting every nation of Indians on the Continent of North America,’ Catlin declared, and in 1830 he set out to meet William Clark in St. Louis, hoping to learn as much as he could about the American West from the great explorer.
In 1832 Catlin made his first journey west, traveling more than 1800 miles up the Missouri River. He had only a short time to accomplish his goal of documenting the essence of Indian life and culture. In 1830, the Indian Removal Act had commenced the twelve-year plan that would remove the remaining Indians from land east of the Mississippi and irreversibly change the face of life for tribes west of the great river as well. Within a few decades, the number of buffalo would drop from millions to a few thousand, and the high prairies would be crosshatched by homestead farms and railroad tracks.
By the decade's end, Catlin had painted more than 500 portraits, scenes, and landscapes and accumulated an astonishing collection of Native American artifacts. He exhibited his collection in major American cities, and in 1839 he crossed the Atlantic to display his Indian Gallery in London and eventually Paris and Brussels as well. In London, Catlin had been received by Queen Victoria and in Paris he was similarly welcomed by Louis-Philippe, with whom he developed a close relationship. The French king even reserved a room in the Louvre for the display of Catlin’s Indian Gallery and scheduled a private viewing for the royal family and guests. He also commissioned copies of 15 of Catlin’s portraits, which remain in the collection of the Musée du Quai Branly—Jacques Chirac, Paris.
In addition to Catlin’s paintings, twelve Iowa tribe members who had traveled with Catlin to England and France also put on a number of performances in the French capital to a rapt court and public. The painter Karl Girardet captured one of these in his Louis-Philippe assiste à une danse d'Indiens Iowa dans le salon de la Paix aux Tuileries, 21 avril 1845, now in the Louvre (fig. 1). The reception of the French press was enthusiastic, describing it as a ‘genuinely American product.’ Many Romantic artists took an interest as well, including the poet and writer Charles Baudelaire, novelist George Sand, painter Eugène Delacroix, and of course, Gérôme. Among the performers was an Iowa medicine man known as Si-non-ti-yah, who wore a ceremonial outfit with buffalo horns during their performance of their war dance, as is seen on the figure at lower left in the present work, holding the lion cubs.
Direct refences like these to the performance and paintings he viewed aside, Gérôme’s is a wholly imagined composition, born of the artist’s Romanic imagination at this early stage of his career. Neither the landscape, nor the flora and fauna are representative of the areas where the Iowa actually lived, and certainly it is startling to see Indians flighting a lion, an animal they would have never encountered. Lions, however, would come to form an important segment of Gérôme’s oeuvre (the subject must have held personal resonance, as the artist’s second name, Leon, means lion in French) and were a common subject for the Romantic painters, like Delacroix, in the first half of the 19th century. The interest of the Romantic painters in wild animals was driven by the idea that the truest mode of creation involved free expression of the artist’s feelings, and wild animals were seen as a way for artists to understand this freedom within themselves. If an artist looked deeply enough, without fear of the untamed wild, he could locate something human in the heart of the animal, and in turn, understand the animal within himself more fully as well.
The experimental technique evidenced in this work is also unusual for Gérôme and demonstrates a youthful spirit of experimentation; rather than attempting to replicate the skin tones of the figures and nuances of the lion’s coat in oil, Gérôme instead lets the dark ground show through in these areas, adding in only shades light and dark to capture the form, with glazes of color overlaid for details like costume and body paint where required. Compositionally, the work looks to other great depictions of lion hunts throughout the history of art, including Rubens and the Romantics, with the energy and action of the figurative group swirling around the centrally placed beast, dramatically shown mid-leap. The dynamic and captivating composition presages the almost cinematic quality of the work Gérôme would come to produce in the decades after.
This work was due to be included in the exhibition Seeing Is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, 3 November 2024 - 22 February 2025 but was withdrawn by state authorities due to concerns about displaying nudity.
We are grateful to Emily M. Weeks, Ph.D. for confirming the authenticity of this work and its inclusion in her forthcoming revision to the Jean-Léon Gérôme catalogue raisonné, currently in preparation.
Though best remembered as a neoclassicist and Orientalist painter, Gérôme’s interests as an artist refused to be bound by any school or subject. A voracious traveler, he drew often on his trips in North Africa and the Holy Land for his subject matter, though he drew from mythology, the Bible, French history, and contemporary life as well. But Gérôme’s imagination could be sparked just as easily by places he would never visit, as in the case of La Chasse aux lions chez les Indiens.
In the case of the present picture, that spark came from the arrival of the American artist George Catlin in Paris in 1845, where he had come to exhibit his Indian Gallery, now a part of the Smithsonian Collection. Caitlin was the first artist to travel west of the Mississippi to paint both portraits and scenes of everyday life among the Native American Tribes, turning his back on his previous life in Philadelphia, where he had been a successful lawyer and a miniaturist. ‘If my life be spared, nothing shall stop me from visiting every nation of Indians on the Continent of North America,’ Catlin declared, and in 1830 he set out to meet William Clark in St. Louis, hoping to learn as much as he could about the American West from the great explorer.
In 1832 Catlin made his first journey west, traveling more than 1800 miles up the Missouri River. He had only a short time to accomplish his goal of documenting the essence of Indian life and culture. In 1830, the Indian Removal Act had commenced the twelve-year plan that would remove the remaining Indians from land east of the Mississippi and irreversibly change the face of life for tribes west of the great river as well. Within a few decades, the number of buffalo would drop from millions to a few thousand, and the high prairies would be crosshatched by homestead farms and railroad tracks.
By the decade's end, Catlin had painted more than 500 portraits, scenes, and landscapes and accumulated an astonishing collection of Native American artifacts. He exhibited his collection in major American cities, and in 1839 he crossed the Atlantic to display his Indian Gallery in London and eventually Paris and Brussels as well. In London, Catlin had been received by Queen Victoria and in Paris he was similarly welcomed by Louis-Philippe, with whom he developed a close relationship. The French king even reserved a room in the Louvre for the display of Catlin’s Indian Gallery and scheduled a private viewing for the royal family and guests. He also commissioned copies of 15 of Catlin’s portraits, which remain in the collection of the Musée du Quai Branly—Jacques Chirac, Paris.
In addition to Catlin’s paintings, twelve Iowa tribe members who had traveled with Catlin to England and France also put on a number of performances in the French capital to a rapt court and public. The painter Karl Girardet captured one of these in his Louis-Philippe assiste à une danse d'Indiens Iowa dans le salon de la Paix aux Tuileries, 21 avril 1845, now in the Louvre (fig. 1). The reception of the French press was enthusiastic, describing it as a ‘genuinely American product.’ Many Romantic artists took an interest as well, including the poet and writer Charles Baudelaire, novelist George Sand, painter Eugène Delacroix, and of course, Gérôme. Among the performers was an Iowa medicine man known as Si-non-ti-yah, who wore a ceremonial outfit with buffalo horns during their performance of their war dance, as is seen on the figure at lower left in the present work, holding the lion cubs.
Direct refences like these to the performance and paintings he viewed aside, Gérôme’s is a wholly imagined composition, born of the artist’s Romanic imagination at this early stage of his career. Neither the landscape, nor the flora and fauna are representative of the areas where the Iowa actually lived, and certainly it is startling to see Indians flighting a lion, an animal they would have never encountered. Lions, however, would come to form an important segment of Gérôme’s oeuvre (the subject must have held personal resonance, as the artist’s second name, Leon, means lion in French) and were a common subject for the Romantic painters, like Delacroix, in the first half of the 19th century. The interest of the Romantic painters in wild animals was driven by the idea that the truest mode of creation involved free expression of the artist’s feelings, and wild animals were seen as a way for artists to understand this freedom within themselves. If an artist looked deeply enough, without fear of the untamed wild, he could locate something human in the heart of the animal, and in turn, understand the animal within himself more fully as well.
The experimental technique evidenced in this work is also unusual for Gérôme and demonstrates a youthful spirit of experimentation; rather than attempting to replicate the skin tones of the figures and nuances of the lion’s coat in oil, Gérôme instead lets the dark ground show through in these areas, adding in only shades light and dark to capture the form, with glazes of color overlaid for details like costume and body paint where required. Compositionally, the work looks to other great depictions of lion hunts throughout the history of art, including Rubens and the Romantics, with the energy and action of the figurative group swirling around the centrally placed beast, dramatically shown mid-leap. The dynamic and captivating composition presages the almost cinematic quality of the work Gérôme would come to produce in the decades after.
This work was due to be included in the exhibition Seeing Is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, 3 November 2024 - 22 February 2025 but was withdrawn by state authorities due to concerns about displaying nudity.
We are grateful to Emily M. Weeks, Ph.D. for confirming the authenticity of this work and its inclusion in her forthcoming revision to the Jean-Léon Gérôme catalogue raisonné, currently in preparation.