Black Panther Stalking a Herd of Deer

Gérôme signed and dated this canvas 1851 at the lower left, while he was still in his twenties and had not yet travelled beyond Europe. The scene is imagined. A black panther, a jungle cat, creeps along a scrubby shore in open country where it would hardly hunt, toward a herd of deer grazing far off by the water under a sunset sky. Gérôme knew big cats from the Jardin des Plantes, the Paris zoo, where he went to study its lions and tigers. Years later he hunted big game in North Africa and kept a menagerie of exotic animals at his own home.

He gave this painting to the poet and critic Théophile Gautier. After Gautier died in 1872, it was sold with his collection at the Hôtel Drouot, the Paris auction house, in January 1873. A Bostonian, Knyvet Winthrop Sears, bought it there, and it passed down in his family until it was given anonymously to the museum in 1930.