French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme created The Two Majesties (Les Deux Majestes) in 1883, the same year that Frederick Layton committed to building his Milwaukee art gallery. Edward P. Allis, the nineteenth-century Milwaukee entrepreneur whose business would become the massive Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company, purchased this grand salon-style painting for his personal collection the year the Layton Art Gallery opened. In April 1888 the Milwaukee Sentinel celebrated Allis’ important acquisition:
Mr. E. P. Allis has by a number of recent importations added several more choice art treasures to his notable collection. Among them is a noble Gérôme, a canvas of larger dimensions than those of the majority of Mr. Allis’ pictures. It is entitled “The Two Majesties”—The sun, in all the glories of his self- immolation, casts his parting shafts in a resplendent shower upon a magnificent lion, who crouches in stern defiance of his dying foe amid the arid silence of the rocky Nile sands. It is a conception of great poetic wonder.
Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, 1824–1904)
The Two Majesties (Les Deux Majestés), 1883
Oil on canvas
27 1/4 × 50 3/4 in. (69.22 × 128.91 cm)
Layton Art Collection Inc., Gift of Louis Allis L1968.82
