Royalty at Home

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Artist: Rosa Bonheur (French, 1822–1899)
Medium: Watercolor with white heightening on cream paper
Size: 15 1/2 x 22 in. (39.37 x 55.88 cm) (image)
Museum: Minneapolis Institute of Art
Rights: Public Domain Mark

Rosa Bonheur depicted this lion and lioness in a rocky north African landscape, but it is more likely that she studied the animals in captivity in France. In her recent book Myth and Menagerie: Seeing Lions in the Nineteenth Century (2024), scholar Katie Hornstein proposes an identity for the two lions depicted: Sultan and Saïda, the famous lion and lioness owned by the French lion tamer François Bidel. Bidel described a work by Bonheur in his collection depicting the pair that closely resembles the present watercolor.

Sultan killed a man, a railway porter, on his voyage from Africa to France in 1879, and he seriously mauled Bidel during a performance in 1886. This ended the lion's stage career and relegated his existence to a cage, albeit still on public display. Saïda died of stomach inflammation after mauling a bear in a performance, perhaps in 1883 (Hornstein 2024, p. 247n80). This would make the watercolor a posthumous portrait of her.

Text: Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), CC BY 4.0.