A Lioness Striking a Wild Boar

A lioness has her teeth in the neck of a wild boar, and the boar can no longer fight back. Frans Snyders painted this in Antwerp around 1620 to 1625, a few years after Rubens had begun painting large hunts for princely buyers, horsemen fighting lions, tigers and boars. The Alte Pinakothek sees Snyders's close study of those pictures in the heavy modelling of the bodies. The bite at the neck is a motif that goes back to ancient art, and Rubens used it several times. Snyders kept the motif and left out the people. As a specialist in animals and still life, he put no riders and no hunters on a canvas nearly two and a half metres wide, only the lioness and her prey.