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Jean-L&#233;on G&#233;r&#244;me (French, 1824-1904)<br/>The Nile in flood, Thebes <br/>signed 'J.L.GE

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Lot 15

Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, 1824-1904)The Nile in flood, Thebes signed 'J.L.GEROME.' (lower left)oil on canvas78.1 x 116.9cm (30 3/4 x 46in).Footnotes:ProvenanceWith Vose Galleries. Private collection, Canada. ExhibitedParis, Salon, 1901 (according to Ackerman).Vose Galleries, Boston Sale, New York 7-8 March 1929, no. 168. LiteratureOeuvres de J.-L. Gérôme (Bibliothèque nationale, Paris), XXIII, 14 b. Gerald M. Ackerman, The Life and Works of Jean-Léon Gérôme, London, 1986, no. 468, p. 285 (illustrated, dated 1901 and catalogued as lost).Gerald M. Ackerman, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Monographie révisée, catalogue raisonné mis à jour, Paris, 2000, no. 468, p. 354 (illustrated, dated ca. 1900-1904 and catalogued as La Plaine de Thèbes pendant l'inondation du Nil, and catalogued as lost).Gérôme's interest in recording ancient Egyptian monuments was sporadic, and these subjects are rare within his oeuvre. His fascination with the Colossi of Memnon, however, was more enduring. The focus of at least six compositions in various media, these storied statues of the 18th-dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep III (1386-1353 BCE) form a distinctive subgroup of Gérôme's Orientalist works produced between 1856 and 1904. These images yield important information about archaeology, conservation, and tourism, Egypt's pharaonic and classical past, its natural history and changes in its agricultural practices, and Gérôme's understanding and experiences of them all. In the present work, exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1901 and likely based on on-the-spot sketches made during Gérôme's first trip to Egypt in 1856-7 (including a sketch dedicated to Gérôme's mentor, Paul Delaroche; fig. 1), the artist depicts the Colossi at sunrise, at the beginning or, perhaps more likely, at the end of the annual Nile flood. The view is to the approximate north; today, this would position the artist on the modern road on Luxor's West Bank, which connects the Nile ferry docks to some of Egypt's most-trafficked tourist sites. This particular stretch of road lies atop an old berm built around the hawd or irrigated field around the Colossi, which helped to contain the rising waters of the flood. The artistic liberties that Gérôme has taken with the siting of the statues is readily apparent; nevertheless, the basic conception of the Theban hills in the background, with the statues at the entrance to the ancient mortuary temple of Amenhotep III on the floodplain nearer the Nile, is accurate. (In addition to his sketches, Gérôme may also have used contemporary photographs as an aide-mémoire, notably those taken by his friend and traveling companion during that first Egyptian journey, Auguste Bartholdi; fig. 2.) Contemporary viewers would have known Gérôme's subject by the time of the painting's exhibition in 1901, both from his earlier visual examples, including widely circulated prints made by Gérôme's dealer and father-in-law, Adolphe Goupil, and related literary texts. Describing a photogravure made after one of Gérôme's Colossi scenes, one 19th-century author penned, 'Now, the ruined statues of King Memnon, fabled of old to sing at sunrise, form the conspicuous heroes of this wide desert scene, where all seems colossal, strange, adapted to another scale that that of humanity ... Other lands tempt by their beauty, by their capacity of improvement; Egypt fascinates by its stability of ruin, and by its story of a splendid past, written in granite. Of all the artists whom genius has given a mission to penetrate into this place of awe, and bring back the record of its desolation, none equals Gérôme in the tangible distinctness of the impression he leaves; he seems to carve his national types in adamant, and fetch them up to the eye as a series of images that can be weighted, felt, and estimated.' Théophile Gautier's laudatory words about Gérôme's Colossi subjects had first been published in 1856, to the great interest of French visitors to the Salon. They were transcribed into English by the artist's American biographer, Fanny Field Hering, in 1892, making them as well-known in that country as abroad: With a sigh and a shudder, we move on beside the great critic [Gautier] and pause before the Memnon and Sesostris. / 'Two mountains sculptured in the form of man which neither time, nor tremblings of the earth, nor conquerors much more terrible, have been able to move from their base. They are there, their colossal hands crushing their knees, shapeless, monstrous, flat-nosed, returning slowly to rock, standing out against the arid background of the Lybian [sic] range which lies barren beneath a scorching sun - rosy in the light, blue in the shadow. Memnon has lost his voice, and, since the Roman Emperor essayed its restoration, no longer salutes Aurora. The inscriptions on the pedestal seem to-day untrue, but the phenomenon of his melodious vibration is established by history in the most incontrovertible manner. At the foot of these gigantic statues, a group of men and camels may serve as a scale of comparison; they scarcely attain the height of the base-plate. To relieve this landscape of limestone and granite, M. Gérôme has placed in the foreground several clumps of green herbs, which the summer will soon change into tawny tufts, resembling a lion's mane ... / The Plain of Thebes is the reverse side of the picture we have just described. The foreground consists of fragments of enormous columns, in scattered blocks, on one of which is carved the image of a god; it is the debris of a ruined palace, probably that of Amenophis; beyond the ruins stretches a plain subject to inundations, crossed by a road along which a caravan of dromedaries is passing ...The two colossi, with great difficulty diminished by the distance, reappear, seen from the back, their royal tresses gathered and knotted behind their heads like a queue à la prussienne. Farther on, the eye discovers blackish lands, besprinkled with trees and palms, and to the right hillocks, or rather mounds formed of ruins, fragments of which stick up through the ground. In the background a chain of distant mountains, rosy and purple; over them a sky mixed with heat, which seems to lie far above and behind the shimmering, luminous atmosphere, and on which a flock of wandering storks make microscopic points,' (quoted in Fanny Field Hering, Gérôme: The Life and Works of Jean Léon Gérôme, New York, 1892, pp. 66-7; Gautier's original French text appeared in L'Artiste, 28 December 1856, p. 23). The 'shimmering, luminous' atmosphere that Gautier describes in the Plain of Thebes is repeated in the present work.

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