THE English are usually considered the masters of sentimentality in animal painting.
The French, despite eating their horses, have also created some of the most emotionally moving equestrian art. One of these is about to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London, and it is perhaps the most compelling of all.
Having been a long-term admirer of Jean-Leon Gerome’s Rider and his Steed in the Desert, it was always frustrating that the owner was unknown. This detail is still not in the public domain, but at least it is on the market again for the first time in 40 years. Perhaps it will end up on public display after the auction. I hope so. With an estimate of more than RM6 million, it won’t be joining my own small collection.
This painting has consistently generated positive publicity for a field that is still treated with suspicion. Many collectors don’t like the academic realism of Orientalist paintings; others don’t trust the taint of ‘Orientalism’ in the other sense of the word, as proclaimed by the Palestinian academic, Edward Said in 1978.
Anyone with a soul and a mild interest in mankind’s relationship with the animal kingdom should love this work. It is neither dry nor academic and is certainly not disparaging towards the Arab rider or his horse. With Ramadan just around the corner, it’s also a timely reminder of how extreme the privations of thirst and hunger can be.
This is a real love story by an artist who was far from being a great romantic. Naked flesh was his speciality, often involving slaves. He didn’t discriminate between 19th century North Africa and 1st century Rome. His paintings may look prurient but he was a passionate anti-slaver at a time when this had led to civil war in America.
MAN AND STEED
With the dying horse, there is no question about Gerome’s message. Could there be a more sensitive view of man and soon-to-lamented steed? Others have tried, including Theodore Gericault and that rare entity in the 19th century, a prominent woman artist. Rosa Bonheur painted something similar, earlier, but her horseman is too obvious, with hand over face, to be entirely convincing. It also lacks the feeling of total desolation that Gerome has created.
Perhaps the reason Gerome’s painting is so moving is because it’s so different from his usual work. This was not an artist who left town very often. Palaces, bath houses, mosques and other urban haunts were his natural habitat. The great emptiness of the desert wasn’t his style at all.
He had been there, sketched it and then left. The memory had clearly stayed with him. The hazy light of the desert is almost sickeningly direct. The contrast between the slick finish of the rider and horse, contrasted with the bleakness of their surroundings is a result of his pioneering interest in photography as a record. The horse’s chestnut coat glistens in the sun and the tack has the artist’s usual precision.
All around them though is nature at its most hostile.
Gerome knew that losing your transport in the desert was potentially as tragic for the rider as the ridden. There could be no closer bond in surroundings such as these. With mechanisation taking over much of the West, and some of the Islamic world too, Gerome may have been mourning the union between noble beast and man as much as an individual horse. This is visual poetry, following on from the verbal poetry of Charles Millevoye, who wrote of a similar experience in the desert:
This noble friend,
Lighter than the wind.
He sleeps,
At rest under the moving sands.
The poem ended up as part of a bronze sculpture and inspired a drawing by Gericault (Arab Crying over his Dead Horse), before being transposed into Gerome’s 1872 fully finished ode to loss. Gerome was so far from taking the stance of looking down on desert dwellers.
He stated: “The Orient is what I dream of most often… I’ve always had a nomadic disposition.” Although very successful in his day, even he might be surprised by how much collectors are prepared to pay for a slice of that nomadic lifestyle.