The lion in love (painting)

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Camille Roqueplan: The Lion in Love (1836). Oil on canvas, 195.5 × 153 cm. Wallace Collection, London

The enamored Leo ( Le Lion amoureux, today: The Lion in Love ) is the title of a painting by Camille Roqueplan (1800-1855) from the year 1836. The work is part of the inventory of the Wallace Collection in London.

description

In the foreground in a pristine park landscape sits a lady, dressed as an exotic shepherdess, who is concentrating the claws of a lion lying next to her and gazing at her with a pair of secateurs. In the background of the picture a young woman can be seen on the left, holding four hunters with dogs and lances from their final mission with a clear arm movement.

Camille Roqueplan: Le Lion amoureux , no date; Chalk drawing. National Magnin Museum, Dijon

The light follows an artificial direction. In the background, on the left edge of the picture, it slightly emphasizes the gestures of the young woman, while first directing the viewer's gaze into the foreground to the shepherdess's décolleté, which is generously extended by a slipped shirt, which the lion is also looking attentively at. The composition emphasizes an inclined vertical axis, which extends from the illuminated head of the lady over her chest and her hand with the scissors to the foot peeking out from under the skirt and which forms a segment of a circle with the light shoulder, the sleeve and the skirt. It is cut by a slightly diagonal line that leads from the clipped paw to the illuminated area of ​​the young woman in the background. In a chalk study, Roqueplan emphasized the idea of ​​a diagonal structure with the lighting.

The painting style is academic and shows the work as a salon painting , which was preferred by the public around the mid-19th century. In terms of art history, Roqueplan's works are assigned to Romanticism .

interpretation

The motif refers to a fable by Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695): Le Lion amoureux (The Lion in Love): A lion who has fallen in love with a shepherdess rashly agrees to her father's suggestion to clench its teeth and claws so as not to endanger the daughter. As a result, he, now defenseless, becomes a victim of the dogs set on him. While with La Fontaine it remains unclear who is robbing the lion of its innate weapons, Roqueplan works out the erotic motif of the story and thus refers to the biblical story of Samson and Delilah . The romantic fairy tale motif La Belle et la Bête is given a modern interpretation by Roqueplan: the disarming attraction of women is life-threatening, drives you mad and becomes fatal.

reception

Ferdinand Max Bredt (1860–1921): Resting woman with a book (n.d.)

In the course of the 19th century, the destructive attraction of female charisma became a preferred subject in the figure of the femme fatale in literature and art, in music theater and in the life of a bourgeois man.

The fateful woman, with her delivered big cat in her lap or resting on the fur of such a cat, has been a popular motif since the second half of the 19th century, including subtle erotic depictions.

Provenance

The work was exhibited under the title Le Lion amoureux in the Salon de Paris in 1836. It was subsequently owned by Ferdinand Philippe d'Orléans (1810–1842), son of Louis-Philippe of France and heir to the French throne. His widow Hélène , Duchess of Orléans, sold the painting on January 18, 1853 in Paris to Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford. His illegitimate son Richard Wallace inherited his father's extensive art collection. The painting thus became part of what is now the Wallace Collection and as a result got its English-language title.

literature

  • Theophile Gautier : Camille Roqueplan . In: Histoire du romantisme . G. Charpentier et Cie, libraires-editeures, 1874; Pp. 191-199; P. 195 ( Online French )

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Le Lion amoureux . In: Les Fables ; livre IV, 1. 1668/1694
  2. ↑ The Lion in Love (Wallace Collection homepage: Commentary)
  3. ↑ Heather Braun: The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale in British Literature, 1790-1910 . Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, United Kingdom 2012; P. 3 ( excerpts online )
  4. ^ Theophile Gautier: Camille Roqueplan (1874), p. 195
  5. ↑ The Lion in Love (Homepage of the Wallace Collection: History )
  6. ^ The Art Journal. Vol. 5, 1853, p. 81: Sale of the Pictures of HRH The Duchess of Orleans

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