A famous lion painting is a picture where the lion carries a meaning or holds the whole scene. It can stand for a threat, a state, a prophecy or a patron saint, and sometimes it simply poses for its portrait.
I like these pictures for the effort behind them. Several painters worked from a zoo, a menagerie or a stuffed display, because a real lion was hard to meet. The pictures date from the sixteenth century to the twentieth.
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How These Were Chosen
A work belongs here when at least one of these is true: the lion is its main subject, or the artist, the museum or an art historian has explained what the lion means. Only paintings qualify, so prints and drawings are out.
12. Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer (1883)
Far out on the sand of a Roman arena, a small group of Christians kneels in prayer.
A crowd packs the stands all around them. Lions climb a ramp from the dens beneath the arena floor, up into the daylight.
In the background, figures on crosses are already burning. Jean-Léon Gérôme finished The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer in 1883.
The canvas is in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
William T. Walters, the collector whose name the museum bears, commissioned the painting in 1863. Gérôme delivered it twenty years later.
In a letter to Walters dated July 15, 1883, he explained that he had repainted it three times from the start. A study at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, in Salt Lake City, records an earlier version of the composition.
Discussing that study, the scholar Joan Mut Arbós notes that Gérôme hesitated over where to place the martyrs.
The lions do not leap. Coming out of their dark dens, Gérôme wrote, their first reaction must have been surprise at the daylight and the huge crowd.
Mut Arbós, writing in volume 77 of the Journal of the Walters Art Museum in 2024, reads the picture through that passage.
My eye stays on that hesitation on the ramp.
The burning crosses have a story of their own. Mut Arbós thinks it likely that Gérôme added them after seeing a canvas by the Polish painter Henryk Siemiradzki, exhibited in Paris in 1878.
The setting raises another question. In his letter, Gérôme placed the scene in the Circus Maximus, down to its goal posts and the chariot tracks in the sand.
Yet the tiers of seats look more like those of the Colosseum. The hill crowned with a temple and a colossal statue recalls the Acropolis of Athens.
The museum's catalog entry says such martyrdoms never took place in the Circus Maximus, and Gérôme "has subordinated historical accuracy to drama."
Those chariot tracks tie the picture to an earlier Gérôme, The Chariot Race of 1876, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Mut Arbós reads the two canvases as part of one set of arena scenes.
To her, those tracks record what the arena saw earlier in the day. The same triumphal arch, barely visible at the back of the race, appears again in the arena of the martyrs.
On January 24, 1967, conservators at the Walters removed the painting's varnish, lined the canvas and retouched its losses.
At a Glance
Artist: Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 to 1904)
Painted: 1863 to 1883, delivered in 1883
Medium: Oil on canvas
Collection: Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
About This Painting
How big is The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer? The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer measures 87.9 by 150.1 centimeters, about 34 5/8 by 59 1/8 inches. In its frame, the painting reaches 139.7 by 202.25 centimeters, about 55 by 79 5/8 inches.
Where did Gérôme sign the canvas? The signature "J. L. Gérôme" sits at the left of the picture. The Walters catalogs the painting under the number 37.113.
How did The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer reach the Walters Art Museum? William T. Walters received The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer from Gérôme in 1883. Henry Walters inherited it in 1894. He bequeathed it to the museum in 1931.
Where is the earlier study for The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer? The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, in Salt Lake City, holds the study under the number 1988.014.001.
11. Peter Paul Rubens, Daniel in the Lions' Den (about 1614 to 1616)
Lions crowd a rocky den on this huge canvas. In their midst, the prophet Daniel, almost naked, joins his hands and raises his eyes to the sky in prayer.
A ray of light falls on Daniel's face. Peter Paul Rubens painted the scene about 1614 to 1616.
The canvas belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.