Stalcup on Hornstein (2024)

With the 1794 establishment of the menagerie in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes came a public eager to view the living trophies France had acquired through various militaristic enterprises abroad. These included Barbery lions, whose continued repopulation throughout the nineteenth century depended on political negotiations between France and Algeria, where lions were captured and sent to menageries, circuses, or even private homes. Artists like Théodore Géricault, Édouard Manet, and Rosa Bonheur studied these lions and then featured them in works of art that resisted traditional imaginings of these animals and cast them as modern subjects. Katie Hornstein’s moving study considers nineteenth-century lions and the ways artists observed them in spaces meant for spectatorship and then rendered them in ways previously reserved for humans. Richly researched and abounding with stunning images, Hornstein’s book argues that the display of these creatures in spaces of leisure and their subsequent artistic representation were inseparable from “European imperial worldmaking” and “histories of dispossession and disappearance” (215). Indeed, even as lions proliferated in art and in captivity, wild Barbery lions had essentially vanished from North Africa by the end of the nineteenth century due to overhunting.

In chapter one, Hornstein explores images depicting Marc and Constantine, a pair of lions installed in the Jardin des Plantes in 1798. This celebrity feline couple inspired artists to question historic notions and symbols of power “in an age of constant and urgent efforts to invent new ones” (18). Nicolas Maréchal’s series of vellum portraits of the lions showcase the animals as natural specimens while highlighting the artist’s invention. Jean-Baptiste Huet’s portrait of Marc and Constantine with a litter reveals early nineteenth-century concerns about fear and containment. Huet’s sizeable painting stokes wonder and anxiety to mesmerizing effects as mother, father, and cub stare directly at the viewer, whom Huet implicitly positions inside the cage. Such images, Hornstein argues, display the modern predicament of the menagerie lions as deracinated creatures confined to a state-sponsored scientific space and site of divertissement. 

Chapter two explores artists of the 1820s who studied the lions in cages but also in the Muséum d’histoire naturelle’s dissection laboratories and taxidermy exhibits. Not simply objects to see or paint, these lions were “individual historical subjects,” Hornstein contends (57). An artist like Théodore Géricault sketched living and deceased lions and drew from images by Peter-Paul Rubens at the Louvre as he created his magnificent painting of the head of lioness. Mysterious and expressive, this painting engages the viewer in an “ambiguous form of seduction” born of the artist’s imagination (74). Yet Hornstein resists art-historical tendencies to heroize the Romantic artist by arguing that figures like Géricault and Eugène Delacroix created these images only in relation to a contingent set of circumstances that afforded the coexistence of artist and lion in Paris at this time. 

Antoine-Louis Barye’s life-size Lion Attacking a Snake is the focus of chapter three. This life-size sculpture presents an adult male lion in riveting detail, bearing fangs and claws as he casts himself upon his prey. The poise that defines many of the lions previously discussed gives way to ferocious action in this sculpture, which elicited varied critical opinions. Théophile Gautier claimed that Barye freed the lion of the noble foppishness that characterized traditional leonine sculptures. One critic found Barye’s lion more lifelike than those on view at the Jardin des Plantes, while Jean Reynaud suggested that Barye “represente[d] the lion on the animal’s own terms” (123). Hornstein asserts that Barye “challenged the centrality of human form as the basis of sculpture” (115) and thus freed the lion from art-historical anthropocentric constraints and the cages its living models inhabited.  

Hornstein’s fourth chapter proposes the lion hunt as a meeting place of wild animals, European artists, and imperialist endeavor. A discussion of Horace Vernet’s painting of the subject reveals his rabid support for French colonial practices, which included rewarding officers for killing or capturing lions in Algeria. On rare occasions, non-elites hunted lions, such as Jules Gérard, who fashioned his own celebrity by self-promotion, by imagery featuring his exploits, and by gifting a lion, Hubert, to the Paris menagerie in 1847. In 1881, Édouard Manet exhibited his portrait of Eugène Pertuiset, another noted hunter, at the Salon. Here, any hint of alleged courage, however barbaric, is diminished by Manet’s strange rendering and placement of the Pertuiset and his lion trophy in a Parisian forest. Symbols of France’s desire for domination, these images sadly forecast the extinction of the wild lions they represent.

Hornstein’s final chapter explores fairgrounds and circuses: sites of commercial exploitation that allowed spectators even closer proximity to lions. Artists like Rosa Bonheur studied these for-profit animals, though she preferred representing them in nature. She produced several images featuring lions from entertainer François Bidel’s menagerie. Bonheur’s peaceful images of Sultan and Saïda countered the truth of their situation, which relied on perilous displays and odd intimacies between lion tamer and animal. Yet towards the end of the century, “the idea of leonine-human proximity had evolved into a facile cliché,” as evidenced by photographs of lions and their captors (173). New photographic technologies could not idealize the lives of nineteenth-century lions residing in urban spaces of captivity. Rather, Hornstein shows, they “center the cage as a counterpart to the fantasy image of lions in nature and do not let us forget it” (211). 

One of Myth and Menagerie’s last images is an 1899 postcard featuring Brutus, Héron, and José: three lions from Bidel’s menagerie whom we see behind bars. Brutus looks directly at the anonymous photographer. This devastating shared gaze underscores the reality of captive lions exploited for human pleasure while the photograph challenges the “respectable animal imagery” on view in spaces like the Salon (213). In this regard, Myth and Menagerie serves as an appeal to art history to acknowledge the sources of art’s inspiration, as uncomfortable as they may be. Of equal appeal to art historians and animal studies specialists, Hornstein’s fascinating perspective on nineteenth-century French politics and culture will attract scholars interested in any of these disciplines. This gorgeous book reminds us that the planet we share only has a limited number of resources to feed our cultural creation, curiosity, and consumption.