An Arab Sheikh (1870)

Léon Bonnat: An Arab Sheikh

In 1868-69, Bonnat accompanied Jean-Léon Gérôme on a tour of Egypt and the Holy Land. During the trip, he made a number of sketches, which he used as the basis for paintings after he returned to Paris. Bonnat was an influential teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and included among his pupils Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Thomas Eakins. A bearded Arab in a crimson caftan and a striped beige burnoose is seated on a carpet holding a sword in one hand and resting his elbow on a divan. Behind him is a saddle. [The Walters Art Museum]

An Egyptian Peasant woman and her Child (1869-1870)

Léon Bonnat: An Egyptian Peasant woman and her Child

Bonnat is said to have studied this peasant woman and child from life while he was in Egypt for the opening ceremony of the Suez Canal in 1869. The painting was praised at the Paris Salon the following year and again when it was first exhibited in New York in 1876. When Catharine Lorillard Wolfe bequeathed the picture to the Metropolitan it was deemed "a true and vital portrait of two clearly realized individuals [with] a wonderful dignity, sobriety, strength, and beauty." [Metropolitan Museum of Art]