Royalty at Home

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.