This small, atmospheric panel captures Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant’s sustained fascination with dramatic light, emotive landscape, and the symbolic charge of the Near Eastern world.
Provenance
Artist (likely, his sale London, Christie's, Manson & Woods, 19 July 1902, lot 84 as The King of the Desert)
Galerie Hubert Duchemin, Paris, 2022
Catalogue note
This small, atmospheric panel captures Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant’s sustained fascination with dramatic light, emotive landscape, and the symbolic charge of the Near Eastern world. A solitary lion sits upon a rocky rise, sharply silhouetted against a sky ablaze with molten yellows, reds, and purple-flecked clouds. The low horizon allows the sunset to dominate the composition, while the loosely rendered terrain dissolves into the heat-suffused radiance. The lion’s upright, attentive pose transforms the animal into a sentinel figure, both guardian and emblem of natural majesty.
Although Benjamin-Constant is most often remembered as one of the leading French Orientalists of the later nineteenth century, especially for his large, theatrical canvases of Islamic Spain and the Maghreb, this panel reflects a quieter, more introspective dimension of his practice. Born in Paris in 1845 and trained under Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889), he achieved rapid acclaim for the chromatic bravura and narrative spectacle of his Eastern subjects, much of which derived from his formative travels in Morocco in the 1870s. Those experiences sensitized him to the intense contrasts of North African light and sky, and the fiery sunset of this panel can be read as a distilled, personal memory of that visual world.
The choice of a lion, however, also places the painting within a broader visual culture of the period. The late nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable popularity of majestic or emblematic animal motifs set against dramatic Orientalist backdrops—a trend epitomized by artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904). Gérôme’s The Two Majesties (1883), which famously stages a lion confronting the vast horizon of a glowing sky, provides a telling parallel. His work, disseminated widely through prints and the commercial networks of dealers like Goupil & Cie, helped establish these images of solitary, regal beasts in exotic settings as icons of both technical virtuosity and romantic escapism.
Benjamin-Constant’s Lion at Sunset can therefore be seen not merely as a personal meditation but as participating in a shared aesthetic and cultural vocabulary that dominated the academic art market of the 1870s-90s. Like Gérôme, he drew audiences with a blend of exoticism, atmospheric spectacle, and symbolic resonance. Yet Benjamin-Constant departs from Gérôme’s polished, almost cinematic finish: here, the handling is more freely brushed, the scene more intimate, the narrative stripped away. The lion becomes less an actor in a staged Oriental tableau than a poetic surrogate for solitude, watchfulness, or the contemplation of power and transience.
In this light, the panel offers a compact summation of Benjamin-Constant’s artistry: the drama of color learned from North African skies; the romantic appeal of Orientalist subjects so fashionable in his time; and an unusually lyrical inwardness that distinguishes his smaller studies from the grand public canvases that made his reputation.
This note was written by Elsa Dikkes.