Appropriately appearing on the market in this year of the Tiger, the present work, painted circa 1888 and signed by Aimé Morot, the artist’s son-in-law, is the finished sketch for the painting today in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

A tiger, from a high vantage point, surveys an army, Roman or Napoleonic, crossing a desert plain. Though an imagined scene (tigers are not indigenous to the north African desert), both the animal and the landscape are minutely observed; the view, presumably of the Sinai, would have been worked up from the artist’s own sketches, photographs, and memories from his travels to Egypt in the 1850s and 1860s; while the tiger’s anatomy is brilliantly observed from the countless visits Gérôme made to the jardin des Plantes (Paris’s zoological garden).

Indeed, because animals in his paintings often play a secondary, supporting role to their human masters, Gérôme is sometimes overlooked as the great animalier artist that he was. As a whole, his painted oeuvre constitutes a true bestiary, his canvases abounding with birds (from cockerels to marabou), lions, tigers, greyhounds, whippets, horses, and bulls, camels, and even buffalo; and turning to sculpting animals in bronze gave him an even deeper understanding of their anatomies, movements, and characters. In some cases Gérôme even included lions (alive or just their pelts) in his paintings as a playful reference to himself, in allusion to his middle name, Léon.