LÉON BELLY | BUFFALOES BATHING IN THE NILE

Marquis de Lambertye (probably Emmanuel, Comte de Lambertye (1806-1888); his sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 17 December 1868, lot 3 (as Buffles se baignant dans le Nil)

Galerie Antinea, Paris

Mathaf Gallery, London (by 1983)

Purchased from the above

Caroline Juler, Najd Collection of Orientalist Paintings, London, 1991, p. 20, catalogued & illustrated

Lynne Thornton, Les Orientalistes, Peintres Voyageurs, Paris, 2001, p. 112, catalogued & illustrated

Buffaloes Bathing by the Nile, painted in the same year that Belly exhibited his most famous painting, Pilgrims going to Mecca (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), at the Paris Salon, characterises Belly’s narratives, which are remarkably unromanticised and focus on real life in real places. 

The setting, the west bank of the Nile near the village of Giza, with its stark terrain of tall palms, mud flats and winding streams, formed the backdrop to many of his paintings. Here, a cowherd corrals his animals towards such a stream, presumably a tributary of the Nile, to drink and cool off. The artist's observation of light is striking - the whole scene is backlit with the bright desert sun glinting off the backs of the animals' hides as well as the herder's robes and headdress.

The painting's first recorded owner was the Marquis de Lambertye, presumably Emmanuel de Lambertye (1806-1888), a keen collector of Orientalist art. His collection included works by Théodore Géricault, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps and Eugène Delacroix, including Le combat (sold in these rooms on 3 June 2009) and Bathers, now in the collection of The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut.