Léon Bonnat

Private Collection, France

Unlined. Under UV: A few scattered pindots of inpainting to the sky.
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Léon Bonnat was born in the Basque city of Bayonne, and his family moved to Madrid when he was 14, where he began his artistic education at the Academia Real de las Bellas Artes de San Fernando and in the Federico Madrazo. In 1854, with a grant from the city of Bayonne, he moved to Paris to study with Léon Cogniet at the École des beaux-arts. Bonnat exhibited at the Paris Salon for the first time in 1857 and came in second place for the Prix de Rome the same year. Even though he did not win, further assistance from his home city granted him three years in Rome, where he became friends with Edgar Degas, Gustave Moreau, and Jean-Jacques Henner.

In 1868-69, Bonnat accompanied Jean-Léon Gérôme (see lots 2, 4, 6, 7, 67) on an extended tour of Egypt and the Holy Land. They were joined by a group of artists and writers, including the expedition's photographer Albert Goupil, the son of Gérôme’s dealer Adolphe Goupil, who allegedly hired an extra camel to carry his equipment, and Willem de Famars-Testas, whose extensive diaries and sketches were later published. They left Marseille and sailed to Alexandria, then traveled to Cairo and Suez. From there to Sainte Catherine’s Monastery, on the Sinai, took them one month, and then they continued north, visiting Petra, Aqaba, the Negev desert, Judea and they reached Jerusalem on April 3, 1868. In his diaries, Famars-Testas notes that “the first glimpse of Jerusalem was gripping… the sun-illuminated city was silhouetted against a violet thundery light, whilst the outlying land lay under the shadow of clouds.” (translated from the quote, Album de voyage. Des artistes en expédition au pays du Levant, exh. cat., Paris, 1993, p. 156). Just as Goupil photographed the city, Bonnat has swiftly recorded this arresting landscape in paint, creating a moving impression of this important trip.