London Art Week Digital – Winter 2020

In association with the second edition of LAW digital and with the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death approaching in 2021, Trinity Fine Art presents a magnificent pictoral highlight which reflects on this theme titled “Les Deux Majestés” (The Two Majesties), by the celebrated French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), which represents not only a fine example of this artist’s “animalier” paintings but also reflects a profound political statement making direct compositional reference to paintings of Napoleon staring out to sea confronting his exiled fate on St Helena, notably those by Benjamin Robert Haydon. The work is an oil sketch for one of the earliest and most enigmatic of Gérôme’s lion pictures from this period; painted in 1883 and now at the Milwaukee Art Museum, which has become a history painting par excellence. Trinity Fine Art’s sketch was given by the artist to his daughter Suzanne Gérôme in around 1900, four years before his death.