JEAN-LÉON GÉRÔME (1824-1904)
A PREPARATORY DRAWING FOR 'NOMINOR LEO'
With an additional lion head (c.1882-1883)
Inscribed by Aimé Nicolas Morot in pencil l.r. dessin de J-L. Gerome / Aimé Morot
Black chalk on paper
16.5 x 25.5 cm
PROVENANCE
Aimé Nicolas Morot (1850-1913), the artist's brother-in-law;
Private collection
We are grateful to Dr Emily Weeks for confirming the attribution of this work on the basis of digital images and for preparing the following catalogue note. This drawing will be included in Dr Weeks' forthcoming revised catalogue raisonné of the artist's works.
In the 1880s, at the height of his long and celebrated career, the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) began a series of animal pictures featuring lions, tigers, and other big game cats.[1] The impressive number of these works produced over the course of the next two decades establishes them as an important subgenre within his oeuvre, with both art historical and personal significance. The lion may in fact be a surrogate for the artist, whose very name contains both the word “Léon” (Latin, “lion”) and a reference to St. Jerome (“Gérôme”), who was often associated with this animal.[2] Contemporaries were quick to note the physical similarities between man and beast, as well: “A superb head with mane tossed back,” wrote M. de Belina of Gérôme in a Parisian art journal, “a lion who paints other lions and one scarcely knows which has the prouder glance, the painter or his model!”[3] In 1883, Gérôme confirmed these allusions and speculations, making the autobiographical connection clear: In an oil painting later given to his hometown of Vesoul, Gérôme inscribed the words “NOMINOR LEO” (“My name is lion”) on a heraldic banner near a male lion stretched out along a rocky ledge. The chalk sketch presented here - recently authenticated and to be included in the forthcoming revised catalogue raisonné - is the only recorded preparatory work for Gérôme’s striking, self-reflexive painting.
Preparatory drawings for several of Gérôme’s most important paintings have recently come to light, offering new information about his process and technique.[4] Varied in degrees of finish and their correspondence to the final composition, they nevertheless consistently display Gérôme’s restless search for perfection. In the present sketch, the artist’s characteristic interplay between firm and delicate lines is evident as he changes the pressure with which the chalk touches the surface of the paper and explores - through line rather than blurring or smudging - relationships of light and shadow. In the upper right, a second, less finished sketch depicts the lion’s head in profile, again through a few spare lines and Gérôme’s distinctive hatching technique. Also visible on the large sheet of paper is an inscription related to the provenance of the work: It was approved by and included in the collection of the artist's son-in-law and executor of his studio estate, the artist Aimé Morot (1850-1913).
Inspiration for Gérôme’s animal pictures may have come from his friendship with Emmanuel Fremiet (1824-1910) and Antoine-Louise Barye (1796-1875), two of the leading animaliers of the day. Indeed, the small-scale bronzes that these men produced led Gérôme to create a variety of sculptures himself, intended both as independent artworks and as working “sketches” for his later paintings.[5] By February 1890, Gérôme’s confidence in his abilities as a nascent animalier had clearly grown:
He was now proposing life-size lion sculptures, “to bring some pleasure into my life and amuse myself a little. It will cost me a great deal, but one can’t pay too dearly for such pleasures!”[6]
Gérôme’s “pleasures” often derived from his exploration of the quieter, more introspective moments in the lives of these wild beasts.[7] In several of his Orientalist works - a genre he would literally define and dominate in the second half of the 19th century - lions are shown drinking from pools in the desert or surveying their domain. In other contexts, they rest in caves or, as here, appear weary or contemplative. Such interests set his works apart from those of his peers, and from most precedents in the field. In the early 1830s, Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) had accompanied his friend Barye to the Jardine des Plantes in Paris, to sketch the newest addition to their menagerie – a Bengal tiger from India. (Gérôme would follow in their footsteps years later, also visiting the Jardine to sketch their famous cats.)[8] These studies served Delacroix well in a series of vigorous oil paintings, watercolors, and small bronze statues created soon after his transformative journey to North Africa, in which lions and tigers are portrayed amid struggle or strife.
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CONTINUATION
Wealthy European collectors found much to enjoy in these exotic and vaguely Orientalist works, including a heightening of emotion, a pleasurable frisson, and a momentary escape from their modern urban lives.[9] Artists’ frequent focus on heroic male cats, moreover, would have held for masculine audiences an especially self-congratulatory appeal.
The differences between Gérôme’s preparatory sketch and the painting he donated to Vesoul in 1885, today at the city’s Musée Gérôme, are subtle but revealing. In the painting, the lion’s expression is harder, sterner, and his face is more directly frontal and spot-lit.[10] In the painting, too, the animal’s hind legs are extended to the right, suggesting both relaxation and a tautness of outstretched limbs. These adjustments add glosses of sobriety or critical evaluation that are absent in the drawing. The anthropomorphizing of the lion, then, developed as the work evolved. As the artist moved from chalk to oil, so his hand and mind continued to actively create.
NOTES
[1] Gérôme’s first lion painting dates from 1848, when he submitted an allegorical image of the French Republic featuring a resting lion to the annual Paris Salon. (Called Le Republique, this work is now at Mairie des Lilas.) His Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayers (1863-83, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore), however, was the painting that established lions as a major and consistent focus within his compositions. Gérôme’s exploration of the lion as the sole subject of his paintings began in the 1880s, the same period in which this work was likely made.
[2] See, for example, Albert Boime “Jean-Léon Gérôme, Henri Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy and the Academic Legacy,” The Art Quarterly, 34.1 (Spring 1971), pp. 11, 25, n. 68.
St. Jerome’s attribute was the lion, having once saved one from injury and pain. In recognition of this association, in 1877 Gérôme had painted a picture (now lost) of St Jerome asleep in a cave, with his head against the body of a dozing lion.
[3] Quoted in Fanny Field Hering, The Life and Works of Jean-Léon Gérôme, New York, 1892, p. 37. Cartoonists too made good use of Gérôme’s well-known preoccupation with big cats, circulating humorous speculations as to “how M. Gérôme paints his lions,” (see, for example, Anonymous, “Comment M. Gérôme brosse ses lions [How M. Gérôme paints his lions],” La Revue Illustrée, vol. 15, 1893, p. 353).
[4] See, for example, two drawings sold at Drouot, Paris, on 7 November 2025 (lot 75); these are related to Gérôme's The Duel After the Masquerade (1857, oil on canvas, 15 1/2 x 22 1/4 in. [39.1 cm × 56.3 cm], Musée Condé, Chantilly, France). The drawings measure 23 x 16.5 cm and are made with black crayon.
[5] To reach a wider audience of collectors, Gérôme’s sculptures were made available at different price points, in different mediums and sizes.
[6] Quoted in Hering, 1892, p. 280.
[7] The nature of Gérôme’s works may be attributed to practicality as well: though there is some evidence of the artist hunting in North Africa and witnessing lions on site, the majority of Gérôme’s encounters with these animals would have taken place in a zoo-like environment, where he would only have been able to view them in isolation and at rest (see L. Lippincott et al., Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750-1900, exh. cat., Amsterdam, 2005-6, p. 124).
[8] Gérôme would also frequent various traveling circuses in Paris, studying the animals and famously adopting one aged lion as a pet.
[9] The Goupil and Knoedler stock books, now housed at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, confirm that many of Gérôme’s lion pictures were purchased by American collectors, as well.
[10] The lion’s look of slightly condescending or disdainful resignation may suggest the artist’s recognition that his pictures were destined for elaborate theorizing and critical investigation, even when his motives might be purely formal or mundane. Indeed, by the end of the 1880s, Gérôme was apparently exasperated by others’ attempts to find profundity and meaning in the finished version of one noted lion painting: “‘What is that?’ said Monsieur Critic, viewing [Les deux majestés] with the air of a connoisseur. ‘That – you see what it is,’ I [Gérôme] replied; ‘a lion in the desert, looking at the setting sun.’ ‘Yes, monsieur - yes, I see. But – but, what does that prove?’ ‘It proves that you are an idiot!’ I answered,” (quoted in Fanny Field Hering, The Century 37.4 [February 1889], p. 495).