JEAN-LÉON GÉRÔME | Rider and his Steed in the Desert

Goupil & Cie., Paris, 1872 (stock no. 7138; acquired directly from the artist)
H.J. Turner, London (acquired from the above in 1875)
Stockleigh House, Regent's Park
Arthur Tooth & Sons, London
Sale: Christie's, New York, 11 October 1979, lot 69
The Fine Art Society, Ltd., London
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1979

Vienna, Weltausstellung (World's Fair), 1873, no. 278 (exhibited together with three other works by the artist: Pollice verso (Phoenix Art Museum), Le Bain maure (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and A vendre: esclaves au Caire (Cincinnati Art Museum))
Paris, Exposition Universelle, 1878, no. 361
London, Guildhall, Corporation Art Gallery, 1895, no. 56
London, The Fine Art Society, Travellers Beyond the Grand Tour, 1980, no. 55, illustrated on the cover

Émile Zola, 'Lettres de Paris. L'école française de peinture de 1878', in Le Messager de l'Europe, 1878, cited
Edward Strahan, ed., Gérôme, A Collection of the Work of J. L. Gérôme in 100 photogravures, New York, 1881, vol. 1
'J. L. Gérôme, 1824-1904', in Revue Universelle, vol. 14, 1904, p. 65
The New Outlook, vol. 76, 1904, p. 148
Art Quarterly, Spring 1971, illustrated
Richard Hall, 'The Wilder Shores of Art', in Connoisseur, no. 821, 1980, p. 194, illustrated
Waldemar Januszczak, 'The Lure of the East', in The Guardian, 30 June 1980, illustrated
Philippe Cruysmans, Orientalist Painting, Brussels, 1982, p. 42, illustrated
Gerald Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Paris, 1986, p. 232, no. 220, catalogued & illustrated; p. 90, illustrated
Eric Zafran, Cavaliers and Cardinals: Nineteenth-Century French Anecdotal Paintings, exh. cat., Cincinnati, 1992, p. 46
Lynne Thornton, The Orientalists: Painter-Travellers, Paris, 1994, p. 101, catalogued & illustrated
Margrith Wilke, 'As Savage as Wild Animals by which they are Surrounded', De bewoners van de oriënt en hun dieren, 1994, p. 69, illustrated
Gerald Ackerman, Jean-Léon Gérôme: His Life, His Work, Paris, 1997, p. 93, illustrated (and dated 1872)
Gerald Ackerman, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Monographie révisée, Paris, 2000, p. 280, no. 220, catalogued & illustrated; p. 102, illustrated
Gérôme & Goupil, Art and Enterprise, exh. cat., Paris, 2000, p. 23, cited, p. 159 (a photogravure of the present work illustrated)
Jean-pierre Digard, Chevaux et cavaliers dans les arts d'Orient et d'Occident, Paris, 2002, p. 242
Catrin Gersdorf, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert, Amsterdam and New York, 2009, p. 107
Maja Brick, 'Les Animaux de Jean-Léon Gérôme', in Revue des Deux Mondes, December 2012, p. 92
Sidonie Lemeux-Fraitot, L'Orientalisme, Paris, 2015, p. 336, catalogued, p. 340-41, illustrated
Mirjam Rajner, 'The Orient in Jewish Artistic Creativity: The Case of Maurycy Gottlieb', in Modern Jewish Culture and Society, vol. 30, 2018, n.p.

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar Ltd., 13 and 14 Mason's Yard, St James', London, SW1Y 6BU: UNCONDITIONAL AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE Structural Condition The canvas is unlined and is securely attached to attached to the artist's original keyed wooden stretcher which has one central vertical cross bar. This is providing an even and stable structural support. There is a tiny repair in the extreme upper right corner of the canvas as viewed form the reverse. This is entirely stable. Paint Surface The paint surface has an even varnish layer. The paint surface has an overall pattern of slightly raised lines of craquelure including corresponding to the stretcher members. This is stable and is not visually distracting. Inspection under ultraviolet light shows one small retouching towards the upper left corner of the composition which corresponds to the minor repair visible on the reverse and a few very small retouchings on the extreme edges including on the far left part of the upper edge and in the extreme upper right corner. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in very good and stable condition.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

'The Orient was the most frequent of my dreams.'
Jean-Léon Gérôme to his friend Charles Timbal in 1878


Painted in 1872, this evocative work captures the moment on a hot afternoon in the implacable brightness of the desert sun, as a horseman comforts his exhausted steed against the backdrop of a range of barren hills. With great mastery and a director's eye for narrative, Gérôme evokes the utter stillness and loneliness of the desert air. The heat is made almost palpable to the viewer through the bright sun on the rider's brilliant white headdress and dishdasha, and the sun reflecting off the horse's shiny coat.

Gérôme had seen such landscapes during his first trip to Egypt with the sculptor and photographer Frederic Auguste Bartholdi in 1856, and again in 1868, notably accompanied by his brother-in-law and photographer Albert Goupil and fellow painters Paul Lenoir, Léon Bonnat, and Willem de Famars Testas. He was therefore familiar with this harsh, wild world, and the way in which its inhabitants braved it with impassive dignity. The glossy coat of the steed and the crisp white linens of the figure seem clean and fresh despite their adverse situation. Gérôme’s controlled brush lends the man and his horse the ancient calm and panache of great viziers straight out of The Arabian Nights, much as in related works such as Arabs Crossing the Desert (1870, Najd Collection).

The conception of the painting was based on sketches Gérôme had made of the desert, but more importantly, on the photographs first taken by Bartholdi and later by Goupil on the expeditions he made with them. Both the panoramic backdrop and the precise style in which it is executed make Rider and his Steed in the Desert a fascinating example of the link between photography and Gérôme’s own painterly vision, based on precision draftsmanship and clear composition. The aesthetics of photography, a process that produced a unique image on metal, had many similarities to academic painting, and Gérôme used the new invention as justification for his obsessive drive for verisimilitude. 'Photography is a vocabulary that can guide artists in their translation of nature, an album in which they can find fresh ideas and new inspiration,' wrote the photographer Antoine Claudet. In this respect, Gérôme’s work also has to be deciphered in the context of contemporary rationalist desires to organise and categorise knowledge, with the founding of the French archaeological institutes in Athens, Rome, and Cairo, and with the birth of the new field of ethnology.

Yet Gérôme skilfully played on his reputation for accuracy. While his travels to Egypt and his use of photography lent his Oriental visions the impact of eyewitness statements, Rider and his Steed in the Desert bore the seal of the artist's nostalgic imagination, perpetuating the notion of the North African desert as a theatrical, cruel, immutable, timeless place at a point when Egypt was, in fact, a fast-changing country and its society was undergoing modernisation from the top down. From 1850, French ships sailed from Marseille to Alexandria via Malta in seven days. From the 1870s, journeys became faster, and soon Alexandria had a rail connection to Cairo. Only three years before painting the present work, Gérôme had been sent to Egypt as part of the French delegation for the inauguration of the Suez Canal, turning Egypt into an international shipping thoroughfare. As Linda Nochlin observed, Gérôme’s paintings underlined 'a strategy of realist mystification', at a time when the Orient was fast becoming more accessible. 'Time stands still in Gérôme’s painting... [He] suggests that this Oriental world is a world without change.'

The theme of the rider comforting his mount had been developed by a number of French Romantic painters in the first quarter of the 19th century, notably by Théodore Géricault. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris owns a drawing featuring a similar composition, evidently a design for the frontispiece of a book never completed. Another version of this frontispiece was sold in the Hans E. Buhler sale at Christie's, London, on 15 November 1985. A drawing in the Bonnat museum in Bayonne has the scene transported to nineteenth-century France in Currassier auprès de son cheval blessé. Gérôme was a good friend of Bonnat, and may have come across the theme through Bonnat's enthusiasm for collecting Géricault drawings. Or again, perhaps the subject was suggested to Gérôme by a similar composition painted by Rosa Bonheur in 1852 (Sudeley House, Liverpool).



To be included in Dr Emily M. Weeks's revision of the artist's catalogue raisonné by Gerald Ackerman.