Jean-Léon Gérôme

Bernard K. Crawford, Lyndhurst, New Jersey
Private Collection, New York

Gerald M. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, with a Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1986, p. 248, no. 299 (as The Grief of the Pasha (variant), measurements reversed and some information inverted with no. 300)
Gerald M. Ackerman, Jean-Léon Gérôme, monographie révisée, catalogue raisonné mis à jour, Paris, 2000, p. 302, no. 299 (as La douleur du pacha, le tigre mort, measurements reversed and with incorrect provenance), illustrated

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This work has been recently restored. Although the surface is a little dusty and perhaps the varnish is not perfect, the painting can be hung in its current state. The canvas is stretched on the original stretcher. It has a wax lining that does not seem to be successful. The painting is clean and in very good condition overall. The paint layer seems to be un-abraded and in beautiful condition. There are no damages or retouches. The painting would be seen to be in remarkable condition if the varnish and lining were reexamined. However, as mentioned above, it also could be hung as is.
"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."

In 1885, Jean-Léon Gérôme painted The Grief of the Pasha (Joslyn Art Museum), a picture featuring the massive and lifeless body of a Bengal tiger (fig. 1).  Immediately purchased by an American collector for the impressive sum of 30,000 francs and hailed by modern scholars as “one of the finest canvases produced by Gérôme during this period” (The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1824-1904, exh. cat., J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and travelling, 2010, p. 204), this painting has only one documented variant in oil, the present work.  More intimate in scale and somewhat starker in detail, the present work nevertheless includes all of the most significant features of The Grief of the Pasha while also introducing a new emphasis on costume – one of the most highly valued hallmarks of Gérôme’s distinctive Orientalist style.

The extraordinary subject of the present work alludes to a poem of the same name, written by Victor Hugo in 1827 and included in the published collection, Les Orientales.  When asked to illustrate a new edition of this volume in 1882, Gérôme chose as the frontispiece a drawing inspired by the concluding verse of the poet’s “La Douleur du Pacha”:  “No, no, ‘tis not those dismal figures who/inspire his wretched soul’s remorse/through shadowy visions that gleam with blood./What, then, ails this Pasha, beckoned by war/yet weeping like a woman, vacant and sad?/-his Nubian tiger is dead.”  This drawing, a reimagined Lamentation scene, would later become The Grief of the Pasha.

In both The Grief of the Pasha and the present work, Gérôme includes a seated Arab man in an ornate setting. Here, the background architecture derives from the artist’s sketches of the Alhambra, which he visited first in 1873 and again a decade later, and from a cache of photographs in the artist’s collection by Juan Laurent (1816-1892).  (In Le tigre et le gardien it is a portion of the Arrayanes courtyard that the artist portrays.)  The man – the grieving Pasha of the paintings’ titles – contemplates the dead tiger before him, which lies on a dark blue Oriental rug.  (Though the central medallion in the present work suggests that it is a prayer rug, the peculiar cruciform-shape of the stylized motif defies convention.)  The man is positioned closer to his beloved pet in the present work than in the larger version, and wears markedly different clothing.  Indeed, he is outfitted in the colorful dress of a nineteenth-century Cairo soldier, recorded by Gérôme in several of his most celebrated works; the man’s pink satin sleeves, burgundy salvars, and distinctively wrapped turban are rendered with an ethnographer’s accuracy, as are the pair of ornately carved and decorated flintlock pistols tucked into his belt.  (An Ottoman saber, or yatagan, is also visible at his waist.)  The benign presence of these weapons is a poignant reminder of the tiger’s erstwhile danger, as well as the waning power of the once ferocious Ottoman Empire.  The eclecticism of this work – from Spain to India to Egypt – and the unexpected profundity of its message were typical of Gérôme, who often combined meticulously observed ethnographic and architectural details into a single, seamless, and remarkably compelling whole.

The subject of this work follows a broader, longstanding tradition in Orientalist painting as well.  In the early 1830s, Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) had accompanied his friend Antoine-Louis Barye (1796-1875) to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, in order to sketch the newest addition to their menagerie – a Bengal tiger from India.  These studies served Delacroix well in a series of vigorous oil paintings created soon after his transformative journey to North Africa, in which tigers are portrayed in the midst of struggle or strife (see The Tiger Hunt, circa 1854, Musée d’Orsay, Paris).  Wealthy European collectors found much to admire in these vaguely Orientalist works, including a heightening of emotion, a pleasurable frisson, and a momentary escape from their modern urban lives. 

In the 1870s and 1880s, Gérôme created his own, highly successful series of pictures of lions, tigers, and leopards in varying sizes and qualities to suit nearly every taste and economic class.  (Like Delacroix, Gérôme made studies in his youth at the Jardin des Plantes, which aided him in this endeavor.  For some of the many examples of Gérôme’s tiger series, see Ackerman, 1986, pp 226, 248, 300-1, and passim, plates 191, 300, 537-9, and passim.)  Gérôme took particular delight in depicting tigers in the desert, watchfully eyeing advancing troops or running full-tilt towards some unseen prey, or, occasionally, in death, tragically sprawled on the marble floors of a Pasha’s palace, as here, or, equally tragically, wrapped around the shoulders of a pelt merchant in Cairo.  The tension between the wild and the tamed, the power of nature and the power of man, and the parallels drawn between the tiger on the prowl and military marauders in foreign lands, seems to have been a resonant theme for this artist, and for contemporary audiences as well.

This catalogue note was written by Dr. Emily M. Weeks.