Jean-Léon Gérôme

Estate of the artist; 

Thence by descent to his daughter, Madame Renault;

Thence by descent until the 1960s; 

Private collection, Paris.  

This plein air oil sketch was almost certainly done on Gérôme's second trip to North Africa and the Near East. Many of these sketches retain the minuscule holes at the corners where the artist pinned the un-stretched canvas to his travel easel; Gérôme used canvas, which he found more durable than the paper he had employed on his earlier trip. In the years to come, Gérôme would return frequently to the plein air sketches he had painted whilst travelling through the Near East and North Africa. This hilltop view looking over Cairo would become the artist’s dramatic portrayal of the young Napoleon Bonaparte surveying his first great conquest.¹

This painting will be included in Dr Emily M. Weeks's forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the artist.

¹ Bonaparte in Cairo, oil, 59 x 102.7 cm. Hearst Castle, California.