Solitude

Jean-Léon Gérôme French, 1824-1904
On View

in

Modern, Level 2, North Wing

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About the Artwork

In this modestly scaled painting, a majestic lion rests on a sandy beach, basking in the warmth of the intense sunlight, away from the elaborate shadows cast by the trees placed outside of the canvas. With relaxed muscles and eyes closed, the wild animal appears to be at ease, organically connected to a landscape of sand, sea, and sky.
Jean-Léon Gérôme applied a limited chromatic scheme to this simple composition, with creamy yellows and whites dominating the foreground, and intense, striated blues in the background. The lion’s anatomy and its tawny coat are painted with Gérôme’s trademark exactitude. The landscape is treated in a more relaxed manner, without the meticulous finish of details. Nonetheless the animal and the environment remain in pictorial harmony thanks to all-encompassing light permeating the surface of the canvas.
Animals always fascinated Gérôme. Early in his career he visited the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris to make studies and sketches, and later he undertook sketching wild animals during expeditions to the Middle East that he embarked upon from 1856. In Solitude, the artist drew on this firsthand experience to convey his outsider fascination with the desert and its wilderness.

Solitude

1890

Jean-Léon Gérôme

1824-1904

French

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Oil on canvas

Framed: 18 3/8 × 25 1/2 × 3 1/16 inches (46.7 × 64.8 × 7.8 cm) Unframed: 11 3/8 × 18 5/8 inches (28.9 × 47.3 cm)

Paintings

European Modern Art to 1970

Bequest of Dexter M. Ferry, Jr.

60.66

Copyright Not Evaluated

Markings

Signed lower left: J. L. Gerome

Provenance

Detroit, Collection Dexter M.Ferry, Jr., by whom bequeathed to the DIA in 1960.

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Exhibition History

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Published References

Boime, A. "Jean-Léon Gérôme, Henri Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy and the Academic Legacy." Art Quarterly 34 (1971): 3-28.

Ackerman, G. M. The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme with a Catalogue Raisonné. London, 1986, p. 264, cat. 368, repr. (as dated ca. 1889-90).

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Catalogue Raisoneé

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Credit Line for Reproduction

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Solitude, 1890, oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts, Bequest of Dexter M. Ferry, Jr., 60.66.

Solitude
Solitude