Nature & Animal Art!

[LandSeaLion]

Thanks, I hadn’t seen that post. Yes, he painted tigers and other big cats too, though he had a soft spot for lions. The idea of them roaming the deserts captured his imagination, despite this generally not being their natural habitat:

Quote:The lion is on the watch, on a high ledge over some desert place, looking for prey in a vast and arid landscape. He carries a lot of dignity on his taut shoulders: seeming to be both alert and patient, and ready to bound down and away if a prospect comes into sight. It is hardly imaginable that Jean-Leon Gérôme had ever seen a lion on any of his trips through the deserts of North Africa and Asia Minor. The lion lives and hunts in grass plains where he can find grazing game, seldom in a desert or on a desert mountain. Furthermore, the lion had been, in Gérôme's time, long absent from North Africa, persisting only in Sub-Saharan Africa and in one province of north-west India. Nonetheless, Gérôme painted many compositions of lions with desert settings. He was evidently fascinated by the desert lions of his imagination, who lived a romantic life maintained by almost desperate hunting for food and water.

(Although there probably were still a few lions in scattered regions in North Africa in the late 1800s.) Reply