Las dos majestades

Jean-Leon Gerome was one of the most powerful figures in Paris art by 1883, a Salon star and a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and he had spent years travelling in Egypt and the Near East. The two majesties of the title are the lion and the setting sun, facing each other across an empty desert. He built the picture from sketches made on those trips, then assembled the scene back in his Paris studio, which is why the light feels staged rather than caught. Around this time he began a run of paintings of big cats alone in the landscape. This is one of the earliest, the animal reduced to a single dark profile against bands of pink and gold.