
Public Domain
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Public Domain
Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

Public Domain
Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

Public Domain
Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.




Jean-Léon Gérôme
French, 1824-1904
Lion in the Desert, ca. 1885
oil on canvas
support: 27 x 36 3/8 inches (68.58 x 92.3925 cm)
Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Gift of Patricia Parkinson Neff and Grace de Cernea Reiniger in memory of their mother Lucia Depew Hurd, 1972
1972:13
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Provenance
Mrs. Lucia Depew Hurd, Buffalo;donated by her daughters to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1972
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Work Type
This information may change due to ongoing research. Glossary of Terms
Lions take center stage in a number of compositions Jean-Léon Gérôme painted throughout the 1880s. At the time, paintings and sculptures by French animalier artists were increasing in popularity among the general public. However, Gérôme’s interest in the subject dated to his student years, when he regularly went to the zoo in Paris to sketch lions. A safari in North Africa in 1885 further fueled his fascination with the animal. It was there that his zeal for exotic subjects and the desert terrain took root. This sketchy and sun-filled landscape of a drinking lion is actually an unfinished composition—the artist’s underdrawing in black ink is still visible.
Label from Menagerie: Animals on View, March 11–June 4, 2017
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Albright-Knox Art Gallery: Painting and Sculpture from Antiquity to 1942
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