Bonaparte Before the Sphinx
Napoleon on horseback facing the Great Sphinx of Giza — a real monument, painted decades after the 1798 campaign it imagines.
The Great Sphinx
The painting shows a real, identified place that you can find today. The exact spot the artist worked from is not necessarily known.
Bonaparte Before the Sphinx — at a glance
- Artist
- Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904)
- Year
- c. 1867–1868
- Movement
- Academic art / Orientalism
- Place
- The Great Sphinx, Giza plateau, Egypt
- Viewpoint
- A real monument in an imagined 1798 scene — shown sand-buried, as it was in the 1800s
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Now at
- Hearst Castle, San Simeon, California
Overview
Bonaparte Before the Sphinx is a history painting by the French academic artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, made about 1867–68. It shows the young General Napoleon Bonaparte on a dark horse, alone in front of the vast, damaged head of the Great Sphinx of Giza, with his staff and a line of troops small in the sand behind him. It is oil on canvas and is at Hearst Castle, San Simeon, California.
The scene is imagined: it evokes Bonaparte's Egyptian expedition of 1798–99, seventy years before Gérôme painted it.
Where was Bonaparte Before the Sphinx painted?
Scholarship The Great Sphinx is a real and specific monument — a limestone lion with a human head, about 20 m high, carved beside the pyramids on the Giza plateau outside Cairo around 2500 BC. Gérôme travelled in Egypt several times and drew the Sphinx from life. In the painting it is shown mostly buried in sand up to the neck, as it was in the nineteenth century before the twentieth-century excavations that cleared its body; the head, the missing nose and the plateau are otherwise as they are today. The map marker points at the real, visitable monument; the confrontation with Bonaparte is Gérôme's invention.
What is in the painting?
Bonaparte, in general's uniform and bicorne, sits his horse in the left foreground, face to face with the colossal weathered head. The Sphinx fills the right of the canvas, sand drifted up to its chin, casting a long shadow. Behind Bonaparte, tiny against the desert, ride his officers and a column of infantry under a pale sky.
Look closely
The sand-buried body
The Sphinx is drifted over up to its chin — its nineteenth-century state, before twentieth-century clearing.
The lone rider
Bonaparte on a dark horse fills the left, tiny against the colossal head.
The distant column
His officers and a line of infantry are reduced to a thread along the desert behind him.
The long shadow
The low sun throws the Sphinx's shadow across the sand towards the general.
Analysis
Composition and meaning
The lone commander and the ancient colossus are set face to face, filling opposite sides of the picture.
Scholarship Gérôme stages a silent confrontation: the small living man of destiny and the enormous, eroded emblem of a vanished empire, with the army reduced to a thread in the distance. The French subtitle ‘Œdipe’ likens Bonaparte to Oedipus before the riddling Sphinx.
Scholarship The picture belongs to the Napoleonic legend as it was cultivated under the Second Empire of Napoleon III, and to a wider nineteenth-century French fascination with Egypt.
History & provenance
The painting was acquired by the American newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst and is at Hearst Castle (the Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument), California.
Sources
- Hearst Castle (Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument), California — collection record for Jean-Léon Gérôme, ‘Bonaparte Before the Sphinx’
- Gerald Ackerman, ‘The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme’ (1986)
Related paintings
More by Jean-Léon Gérôme
Phryne before the Areopagus
The Duel After the Masquerade
The Snake Charmer
