Lion 

Editor: Here we have Jean-Léon Gérôme's oil painting, simply titled "Lion". There's a stillness here, a sense of solitude under a wide sky, but that dry landscape and the bones… give me an uneasy feeling. What do you see in this piece? Curator: Oh, but that uneasy feeling, that's precisely where the magic lies! I think it’s so striking how Gerome captured not just the *lion* but also *loneliness* of the landscape itself. You feel the baking sun, don't you? I imagine he wasn't just painting what he saw, but almost how the desert *felt* to be in. And the animal almost fades into that landscape. Do you think he intended to draw comparisons between the two? Editor: That's an interesting way to think about it, especially with the vast landscape sort of swallowing up the lion, like it's just another part of the scene. That bleak background makes the lion much less regal and much more vulnerable. Curator: Vulnerable, exactly! It defies the Romantic idea of nature as purely sublime and threatening, and it certainly does not make it 'picturesque' like the Realists did, although he painted in that style, apparently. Which is probably why some people are turned off by Realism as cold and technical. But I love what the painter did with these contrasting styles, as if saying: life in the wild is beautiful and frightening. The color! How he finds such rich shades of brown and ochre and rust, almost glowing from the very rock. Do you sense it? Editor: Absolutely. The way you described that contrast… now I see a fragile beauty I hadn't noticed before. It's more than just a lion; it's a story. Curator: Precisely! We go into the canvas like the lion enters our minds. Now *we* have become part of the landscape.