In this compellingly argued book, Myth and Menagerie: Seeing Lions in Nineteenth-Century France, Katie Hornstein offers a new paradigm for integrating art history with animal studies: rather than considering animal representation as a theoretical or visual construct, we are asked to “see” lions as individual personages with their own perspectives, histories, and names. Whether the encounter between nineteenth-century people and lions occurred in the context of zoos and other public menageries; on ships bound from colonial Algeria to France; in the “taming” theatrics of the circus; or in lion-themed paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and photographs, human and leonine life were inevitably entangled and mutually influential. Central to this interspecies relationship was the French colonialist project in Algeria, for which Barbary lions served both as trophies and as ambassadors whose mission was often unclear.  Relocated to the unfamiliar climate of France and forced to live as caged captives, the lions did not generally enjoy robust health and tended to die early—only to be replaced by new individuals whose compromised lives perpetuated what Hornstein argues was the contingency and instability of colonialism itself. Art history’ s role in addressing this issue demands a shift away from our familiar anthropocentrism. “What might be gained,” Hornstein asks, “if we can permit ourselves as viewers to depart from the art-historically comforting categories of artistic greatness, achievement, and the production of an oeuvre, and dwell instead on the meeting between the living artists and the particular withered, captive animals who were the objects of their gaze?” (92).

If “seeing lions in the nineteenth century” was always a relational experience, artists had the option of fabricating from what they saw “mythic” leonine portrayals with the power to inspire or provoke. Hornstein uses art historical techniques to analyze artists’ visual sources and cues without losing her focus upon the actual animals’ lives and the historical circumstances in which they were viewed. She moves chronologically and to a certain extent by medium within the five principal chapters of the book:  beginning with portraits of postrevolutionary lions, we then turn to the lions of Romantism—above all the paintings of Théodore Géricault and Antoine-Louis Barye’s Lion Attacking a Snake (1835; Louvre, Paris)—followed by orientalist and masculinist depictions of the hunt, and with a final chapter on photography, painting and the circus. Perhaps the greatest tragedy in this story of “myth and menagerie” was the Europeans’ belated realization that their colonialist and extractive interventions had driven the Barbary lions to extinction. Eventually all there was left to “see” were the caged descendants of lions absconded from North Africa and their artistic kin.

In keeping with her mission to consider lions as historical protagonists, Hornstein foregrounds in her opening chapter the first celebrity lion couple to inhabit the public menagerie of the post-Revolutionary Muséum d’histoire naturelle: a male and female named Marc and Constantine, who together with their litters provided a model of family cohesiveness for early nineteenth-century spectators. Two artists, Nicolas Maréchal and Jean-Baptiste Huet, furthered the anthropomorphic appeal of the leonine family by applying techniques of human portraiture to their numerous depictions of the family, whose confinement to cages was often implied through limitations of space rather than literally shown. Hornstein illuminates the ways in which Maréchal and Huet fed the needs of their human audience to connect psychologically with the lions; Marc and Constantine, for their part, emerge from the works of both artists as intentional agents of the interspecies dialogue. Most subtle is Hornstein’s analysis of Huet’s confrontational Family of Lions (1801–2; Private Collection), which features Constantine, Marc, and two cubs, one of whom shares with her parents a glowering, toothy expression that registers a warning to the viewer who encounters them.  As Hornstein demonstrates, Huet, who had entered the Royal Academy in 1769 and lived through the Revolution into Napoleon’s reign, evoked through his living leonine subjects both the horrors of imprisonment and the face of human “terror” as it had originally been configured by Charles Le Brun.  

In her second chapter Hornstein takes on the Romantic depictions of Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, and Barye, and simultaneously introduces for our consideration the living creatures whose very presence in France—and ability to serve as models for artists—was the result of complex negotiations between agents of Algeria and France in the context of expanding colonialism. Hornstein replaces mythical Romantic creativity with a historically contingent relationship between human and animal actors, seeking subjecthood in the attacking, gnawing, growling, yawning, sleeping, and meditating creatures sketched and painted by the artists. Among these it is Géricault’s striking Head of a Lioness (1819–20; Louvre, Paris) that emerges as the preeminent portrait of an individual: Hornstein’s sensitive interpretation of this work, combined with her assessment of Géricault’s correlative sketchbooks, reveals a sense of animal interiority ultimately unknown to the human. Delacroix, meanwhile, elicited leonine vitality even from the anatomy table, imparting to his deceased subjects implied expressions of passionate lives lived.  

The lion hunt—depicted both as a splashy, multifigure affair and as portraits of celebrated men with their quarry—occupies chapter four. This theme resonates as particularly ironic given the rapidly dwindling population of North African lions as well as the French territorial expansion that fueled its decline. As Hornstein argues, there was “a direct link between the ecological crisis facing wild animals and their circulation as visual representations and figures of French colonial desire” (135). Next to the orientalist fantasies of violence produced by such artists as Horace Vernet, the actual lions on display in the Menagerie were acknowledged as a “tragedy” even at the time. Of little help were portraits of the celebrated hunters Jules Gérard and Eugène Pertuiset: while the former’s image as slayer of lions was promulgated in prints, his own cub Hubert, whom he raised to be a semidomestic companion, underscored the enfeebled entanglement of the killer and his presumed adversaries. Yet more compromised was Edouard Manet’s large painting of Peruiset kneeling with his gun before a trophy lion skin (1881; Museu de Arte de São Paulo), a construct bewilderingly set in an outdoor landscape as if immediately after the kill. Disjunct even by Manet’s standards, the painting remains caught between life and death, reality and stage, with the great creature’s maw opened, as if in a silenced roar. 

Chapter five turns to circuses and fairgrounds, which provided captive models both to painters such as Rosa Bonheur and to practitioners of the relatively new medium of photography. Given its nineteenth-century limitations, photography could not idealize leonine life as successfully as painters and graphic artists were able to do, highlighting the friction between “myth” and “menagerie” that Hornstein exposes throughout her study. Forced to perform by such star “tamers” as François Bidel, circus lions, despite their proximity to human trainers, behaved so unpredictably they destabilized the presumed intimacy between human and animal in the cage. Rather, it was artists who perpetuated a vision of the lion as ennobled counterpart to human virtue:  Bonheur, who kept cubs among the animals on her estate, “disavowed captivity” in her portrait-like sketches and paintings that close off backgrounds but at the same time privilege the familiar subjects who occupy the foreground (200).

Hornstein closes her final chapter as she begins her first, with a depiction of named individuals—Brutus, Héron, and José—who lived in Bidel’s menagerie but in this photograph do not perform. Rather, they gaze outward from behind the bars of their cage, an imprisonment made all the more stark by the black-and-white medium. Alone among the three, Brutus shifts his eyes to gaze directly at the viewer, thereby insisting that we acknowledge the perpetual tension between modern humans and the descendants of wild subjects such as he.