Gericault’s lifelong interest in animal themes is best known through his love of horses. He had an intimate knowledge of horses, which he derived not only from drawing and painting them continually but also from developing his skills as an equestrian. Even in an era when horses were commonplace, Gericault’s sense of the equilibrium between horse and human was acute. From time to time, he showed interest in other animals—cattle, dogs, boars, and cats also drew his attention. Like horses, cats hold a special place in his work. Domestic cats, like horses, can have a companionable side. But they also evince indomitability, a quality fully embodied by lions and other felines. In the course of his career, Gericault produced numerous studies of one or more lions, as attested, for example, by a sketchbook datable to about 1812–14, in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles (inv. 95.GD.40.1–58). He had a number of opportunities to study live animals. In 1817, Sultan Mulay Suleiman of Morocco sent King Louis XVIII two lions, and it is possible that Gericault was able to sketch them from life in Paris. He unquestionably sketched lions at the London zoo in 1820, during the second exhibition of
The Raft of the Medusa (see fig. 8 above). The artist also owed a fundamental debt to the prints of George Stubbs, as well as to the animal subjects of Peter Paul Rubens, which he had copied from paintings on view at the Louvre and from reproductive prints.[1] Lions were a link to the exotic and to the art of the past, but they also exemplified the concept of the Sublime, that is, the human experience of awe or terror before overwhelming natural forces. This was a prominent theme of the Romantic period during which Gericault worked.
The Painting: This vigorously executed painting, which depicts three adult male lions and three lionesses (or one lioness and two juvenile lions) in a mountainous lair, is an extraordinary example of Gericault’s spontaneous handling of paint. Rather than applying finishing touches to make a polished cabinet picture, the artist left the painting in a state known as an
esquisse, or sketch, a work prized by fellow artists and, increasingly, collectors, for its strength of directly capturing a subject or effect. The setting for these six lions is a remote plateau, evocative perhaps of the mountains of North Africa. Although it may appear at first that they are situated within a cave, the rock-like shapes behind them are mountains. The spectral red light at the far right may be read as a distant, atmospheric reflection of the setting sun: Gericault often employed this device, as in The Met’s
Evening: Landscape (1989.183).
Lions in a Mountainous Landscape is exceptional for a number of reasons, one of which is that the results of its physical examination offer rare insight into Gericault’s creative process (see Technical Notes). Gericault was notorious for campaigns around specific themes that never resulted in definitive compositions. Much of his legacy consists of subjects developed in series of sketches without achieving final form. The grandest of these was
The Race of the Riderless Horses in Rome of 1817, although dozens of examples may be cited, from all phases of his brief career. (Among the most advanced studies related to
The Race are those in the Musée du Louvre, Paris; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille; and Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.) In the present case, the artist sought to develop a composition without an obvious source outside his own work or, it seems, preparatory studies. The aesthetic appeal of sketches painted wet-into-wet with a loaded brush, as seen to such great effect here, were profoundly influential on contemporaries who saw them in his studio, making them fundamental touchstones of the emerging Romantic aesthetic.
There are no known directly related preliminary studies for
Lions in a Mountainous Landscape, but infrared reflectography (see fig. 1) and X-radiography (fig. 2) have revealed a brilliantly spirited underdrawing and pentimenti that illuminate the artist’s working methods as he developed the composition with unusual efficiency. The wood support provided a durable surface that invited and preserved extensive and vigorous underdrawing. The underdrawing was produced quickly, seemingly all at once. No preparatory studies are known. The paint was applied vigorously, even crudely, as if the artist’s intention was to get it down as part of the same burst of inspiration as the drawing beneath it. But the modification to the background (see Technical Note) indicates the artist’s investment in this work.
Context: At an unknown date, Gericault made a painting after Stubbs’s 1788 engraving
A Horse Affrighted at a Lion (The Met
1970.603.1).[2] More relevant to
Lions in a Mountainous Landscape, however, owing not only to its subject but its wood support, is
Study of Five Lions (fig. 3). At 18 7/8 by 22 13/16 inches (48 x 58 cm), it is essentially the same size as The Met’s picture, which measures 19 x 23 1/2 in. (48.3 x 59.7 cm), though the panel construction differs. Both works appear to be painted directly on the wood panel, likely sized, but without a ground. Four of the five felines in
Study of Five Lions derive from Rubens’s painting
Daniel in the Lions’ Den of about 1614/16 (National Gallery of Art, Washington). Gericault knew
Daniel in the Lions’ Den from a print that reproduces it in reverse (fig. 4), which is evident from the direction of the lions both in his painting and in a related drawing (fig. 5). In extrapolating from Rubens, Gericault eliminated the human element entirely, removing any trace of historical narrative to evoke a world accessible only by means of the imagination.
In
Lions in a Mountainous Landscape Gericault extended the process of inventing a wild animal subject essayed in
Five Lions. In
Five Lions, Gericault proceeded in a series of modest steps, by adapting four lions found in Rubens’s composition to a new context and adding the fifth walking lion seen in right profile, possibly his own invention.
Lions in a Mountainous Landscape is, on the whole, more ambitious. It therefore seems probable that
Five Lions preceded
Lions in a Mountainous Landscape. (One element, the bone at the left, is likely a reminiscence of Rubens’s
Daniel.) But it is difficult to reliably assign a date to either work, even given similarities in the material and size of their supports. What is known is that Gericault executed a
Study of a Leopard-Skin Saddle Blanket (fig. 6) on the other face of the same panel as
Five Lions, in preparation for
The Charging Chasseur (Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 4885), exhibited at the Salon of 1812. At an unknown date, the panel support, with
Five Lions on one side and the
Leopard-Skin study on the other, was divided, effectively resulting in two one-sided paintings. These panels do not have the characteristics of supports manufactured for artists, and Gericault may have repurposed elements from another source. He used a similarly unconventional support for a painting of 1813/14, known as
The Farrier’s Signboard (fig. 7).
Despite its seemingly casual composition,
Lions in a Mountainous Landscape is characteristic of Gericault’s use of complex, almost sculpturally modeled figures arranged in a cruciform group, as if on a plinth tilted up slightly at a diagonal, away from the picture plane, the whole dramatically lit from the left, which bears affinities with
The Raft of the Medusa (fig. 8). Gericault’s first biographer and cataloguer, Charles Clément (1867 and 1879), dated the present work after the artist’s return to Paris from Italy in fall 1817, and before he began work on
The Raft in 1818, though it bears noting that
The Raft, completed in 1819 for that year’s Salon, assumed its right-facing composition mid-development.[3]
Legacy: There is a version of
Lions in a Mountainous Landscape (fig. 9), which is generally thought to be a copy by another artist. Philippe Grunchec (1978), the first modern scholar to see The Met’s painting, thought it superior to the Louvre’s canvas, currently catalogued as “attributed to Gericault.” The latter version was considered to be autograph when it arrived at the Louvre in 1936, as a gift from a private collector; The Met’s picture was then hidden from view in the Schickler collection. In addition to stylistic evidence, Grunchec cited circumstantial documentary evidence, which suggests that the Louvre canvas is a copy of the present work, possibly made by Gericault’s close friend Pierre-Joseph Dedreux-Dorcy (1789–1874). Another scholar, Germain Bazin (1997), extended Grunchec’s observations by taking into account the material properties of the Louvre painting, concluding that it is not an autograph work by Gericault. Gericault died at thirty-three on January 26, 1824. His studio sale, evidently planned for spring, was not held until November 2–3, 1824. His friends, students, and other artists may have made copies of many of his compositions during the interval, though it is also possible that they did so previously or even after their dispersal. These copies continue to vex Gericault scholars. Bazin only knew a photograph of the present work and therefore was unable to accept or reject it.
The Louvre version reproduces every detail of the Met’s picture, with the exception of the sides, which are slightly cropped. Missing is the vertical black form at the right margin of The Met’s painting. It seems too geometric to be natural but out of place as a man-made object. Its function has not yet been defined.
Beyond copies, works such as
Lions in a Mountainous Landscape provide the essential link between Rubens and Stubbs and Gericault’s most notable successors, such as Eugène Delacroix (for example, see The Met
69.165.2 and
67.630.13) and Antoine-Louis Barye (for example, see The Met
10.108.3 and
29.100.585).
Jean-Georges Schickler: Of Swiss origin, the Schickler family were well established as bankers in Paris in the early nineteenth century. They are most often associated with Gericault through the famous
première esquisse for
The Raft of the Medusa (Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 2229) that Arthur de Schickler (1828–1919) acquired between 1853 and 1867. But, it was his father, Jean-Georges Schickler (1785–1843), who first owned the present work. The posthumous sale organized by his heirs, held at 17, place Vendôme, Paris, on February 10, 12, and 14, 1844, included two paintings and five drawings of horses by Gericault, but the family retained the present oil study. No direct link between Gericault and Schickler has come to light, but the collector seems to have known Gericault’s close friend Horace Vernet by 1820, when Vernet made a lithograph of his race horse,
Constance. Evidently, all three men shared a love of animals and animal subjects in art.
Arthur de Schickler also owned the
Study of Five Lions, but it is not known whether his father did as well.
Asher Miller 2020
[1] Existing scholarship provides an outline for Gericault’s engagement with leonine subjects. See Lorenz E. A. Eitner,
Géricault: His Life and Work (London, 1983), pp. 232–34.
[2] The painting was divided in the nineteenth century; the two extant fragments are today in separate private collections. See Grunchec 1978, p. 117, no. 194a (horse) and 194b (lion). Gericault would continue to explore animal-to-animal violence in other works, for example two lithographs, both in The Met’s collection,
Lion Devouring a Horse of 1818 (
29.107.127) and
A Horse Being Eaten by a Lion of 1823 (
50.576.100).
[3] See Lorenz Eitner, “Reversals of Direction in Géricault’s Compositional Projects,” in
Stil und Überlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes: Akten des 21. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte in Bonn 1964 (Berlin, 1967), vol. 3:
Theorien und Probleme, pp. 126–33, plates III/20–24.