Royalty at Home

Royalty at Home, a watercolour painted in 1885 and held at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, presents lions in a domestic or resting context — the title's ironic use of 'royalty' framing the big cats in their natural state of powerful repose. The Minneapolis Institute of Art assembled significant holdings of Barbizon and Realist works, reflecting the American institutional appetite for French nineteenth-century painting. By 1885 Bonheur had been studying lions directly for several years and had developed confidence in depicting them in states of relaxation as well as alertness. The watercolour medium suited the informal, intimate quality the title implies — watercolour's softness and transparency were better suited to suggesting the domestic ease of resting animals than oil's more emphatic presence. The royal metaphor ran through much of nineteenth-century lion iconography, but Bonheur used it with a naturalist's knowingness: the 'royalty at home' were also simply animals resting, observed with the same empirical attention she brought to sheep or horses.

Watercolour handling exploits the medium's softness to suggest the animals' relaxed physicality. Layered washes build the tawny coat colours while preserving translucency, and the mane's complex textures are suggested through controlled wet-into-wet technique rather than laboured detail.