Focus on Bonaparte Before the Sphinx and analyze the Reception.
Reviewing the Paris Salon of 1886,The New York Times wrote that Bonaparte Before the Sphinx was one of Gérôme's finest examples of his historical studies.The young Corsican, seated on his horse, is gazing in meditation upon the enormous enigmatic face of stone, that strange memorial of titanic ambitions, of forgotten sovereigns, of a vanished race. ... The master has kept out all distracting details; even those I have mentioned are felt rather than observed, not even the Pyramids are shown – only the cloudless sky, the smooth sand, from whose drifts the gigantic visage rears itself and the solitary, self-communing man.
The painting would be acquired by an American billionaire, himself the stuff of legend:Oedipus…imaginatively sets Napoleon in silent dialogue with the Sphinx, the young man of destiny confronted by the enigmatic gaze of a monument thousands of years old; intriguingly, this painting and its pendant, Bonaparte in Cairo, were to be bought by William Randolph Hearst in 1898.
Napoleon pendant The New York Times Sphinx William Randolph Hearst Oedipus Salon Hearst