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LA CHASSE À LA GAZELLE DANS LE DÉSERT ÉGYPTIEN, SINAÏ

74 by 145cm., 29 by 57in.

signed and dated L. Belly 1857 l.l.

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Private Collection, France

EXHIBITED

Sydney, The Art Gallery of New South Wales; Auckland, Auckland Art Gallery, Orientalism, Delacroix to Klee, 1998, no. 21

LITERATURE

Lynne Thornton, Les Orientalistes, Paris, 1994, p. 22, discussed; p. 23, illustrated

NOTE

The proud stances of the camels and their riders, the fluttering robes, bright sun, and vivid colours combine to make this a work of true bravura, and bear testimony to Belly's genius at capturing the stark light and desert winds of the Egyptian Sinai.

Belly travelled to Egypt three times, in 1850, 1856, and 1857. The Gazelle Hunt was most likely worked up from sketches Belly made in 1856 during his excursion into the Sinai desert with fellow painters Narcisse Berchère and Jean-Léon Gérôme.

'From the wells of Moses we've followed a large plain, partly of sand, partly covered with large pebbles... On the left in the far distance, a chain of low, harsh, fractured mountains. This vast landscape, arid and abandoned, is always of the suavest colour; it seems that nature, so severe here and offering nothing that can refresh the senses, has been provided by way of compensation with the most seductive qualities of light and colour,' Belly wrote to his mother on 30 April 1856 (quoted in Conrad de Mandach, 'Léon Belly', Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 4^th series, vol. 9, February 1913, p. 144).

Belly's experiences in Egypt were the inspiration for his greatest works, most famously his monumental Pilgrims going to Mecca of 1861, now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris (fig 1). The present work pre-dates the Orsay picture by four years.

Fig. 1, Léon Belly, Pilgrims Going to Mecca, 1861, oil on canvas, Musee d'Orsay, Paris