Lion Hunt

Horses surge and screaming lions lash in a tangle of claw and tooth and rearing muscle, a scene of bedlam and motion so violent that the picture seems almost to shake with it — Delacroix’s lion hunt, the subject he had made his own across a long career, from the great Versailles hunting paintings of the 1820s to the small oils of his last years. Painted about 1860 to 1861, this canvas is one of the mature lion-hunt pieces, the animals at the centre of the composition, the hunters secondary to the beasts they are trying to bring down, the whole executed in the thick, multicoloured impasto and the feverish, darting brushwork that marked Delacroix’s late style — a far cry from the smooth finish of his early romanticism, and a manifesto of paint itself. Delacroix, the greatest of French Romantic painters, had been fascinated by lions since his youth in Paris and had studied them at the Jardin des Plantes; the lion hunt, for him, was both an Orientalist subject and a chance to render the most tormented, expressive animal bodies in European painting. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.