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Lot Essay
The lion hunt is a theme to which Eugène Delacroix returned time and again throughout his career. He drew inspiration both from the five-month trip he made to Morocco in 1832, and from the hunting scenes of Peter Paul Rubens, which he considered bravura exercises in colour and movement. On another level, the subject reflected Delacroix's own Romantic leanings. To him, the Arabs held a mirror to a stoic antiquity, which was underscored in the noble life-and-death struggle that the hunt between man and the king of beasts represented.
That Delacroix's hunting pictures were based on fantasy as much as by his observation of local colour is borne out by the fact that he never witnessed an actual hunt (Barbary lions were already rare by the 1830s) and by his sometimes invented subject matter such as, for example, scenes combining both lions and tigers.
In the present work, Delacroix recalls the rocky geography of the Atlas Mountains, visible in most of his animal and hunting scenes. The palette has a Rubensian vibrancy that is quite different from the calmer paintings of daily Moroccan life, which were more factual in their observation of light and colour. Despite the apparent simplicity of the composition, it is lent quiet drama by both the Romantic landscape and by the echo between the hunter's and the lion's four-legged stance.
There are two studies for this painting in the Louvre, one pen-and-ink drawing of a nude man crawling to the left (fig. 1), and a preliminary composition study in pencil on tracing paper. Delacroix also executed a version of this work in pastel, now lost, which once belonged to Edgar Degas.
That Delacroix's hunting pictures were based on fantasy as much as by his observation of local colour is borne out by the fact that he never witnessed an actual hunt (Barbary lions were already rare by the 1830s) and by his sometimes invented subject matter such as, for example, scenes combining both lions and tigers.
In the present work, Delacroix recalls the rocky geography of the Atlas Mountains, visible in most of his animal and hunting scenes. The palette has a Rubensian vibrancy that is quite different from the calmer paintings of daily Moroccan life, which were more factual in their observation of light and colour. Despite the apparent simplicity of the composition, it is lent quiet drama by both the Romantic landscape and by the echo between the hunter's and the lion's four-legged stance.
There are two studies for this painting in the Louvre, one pen-and-ink drawing of a nude man crawling to the left (fig. 1), and a preliminary composition study in pencil on tracing paper. Delacroix also executed a version of this work in pastel, now lost, which once belonged to Edgar Degas.