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Lot Essay
Rudolf Ernst is today one of the most celebrated and sought-after Orientalist artists of the 19th Century. Born in Vienna in 1854, the son of the architectural painter Leopold Ernst, the young Rudolf received his early artistic training at the Vienna Academy. Ernst traveled extensively through Italy, Morocco, Spain and Tunis before settling in Paris and taking French citizenship. He continued to travel throughout the 1890s visiting Turkey and Egypt. While on his travels, the artist bought artifacts and textiles, which he brought back to France and used to enhance the authenticity of his paintings.
Heavily influenced by the academic style of Jean-Léon Gérôme, both Ludwig Deutsch and Rudolf Ernst concentrated on exactitude in detail and intensity of color. The Return from the Tiger Hunt is a tour-de-force of Ernst's Orientalist oeuvre, where the artist strives for photographic exactitude and academic precision while enhancing the composition with his signature verisimilitude in vibrant and elegant color combinations. The colorful costumes of the hunters, executed in jewel-tones of green, blue, red, and gold are set off magnificently by the earth tones of the background. The punctuation of these bold and exquisitely rendered costumes enhances the tension of the figures, each of whom holds the chains which bind their captured tiger. The narrative is enhanced by the doleful expression of the tiger's mate, snarling at the passing hunters.
This was clearly one of the artist's favorite compositions, as at least two other versions are known, albeit with slight variations. The present work is by far the most dramatic of them, with the inclusion of the tiger's mate and the ominous dark rocks in the background.
Heavily influenced by the academic style of Jean-Léon Gérôme, both Ludwig Deutsch and Rudolf Ernst concentrated on exactitude in detail and intensity of color. The Return from the Tiger Hunt is a tour-de-force of Ernst's Orientalist oeuvre, where the artist strives for photographic exactitude and academic precision while enhancing the composition with his signature verisimilitude in vibrant and elegant color combinations. The colorful costumes of the hunters, executed in jewel-tones of green, blue, red, and gold are set off magnificently by the earth tones of the background. The punctuation of these bold and exquisitely rendered costumes enhances the tension of the figures, each of whom holds the chains which bind their captured tiger. The narrative is enhanced by the doleful expression of the tiger's mate, snarling at the passing hunters.
This was clearly one of the artist's favorite compositions, as at least two other versions are known, albeit with slight variations. The present work is by far the most dramatic of them, with the inclusion of the tiger's mate and the ominous dark rocks in the background.