A Suckling Tigress

Around 1620 Antwerp was the European capital of a particular kind of picture, the large animal piece, and painters there turned out lions, boars and big cats on a grand scale. Few of them had ever seen such a beast alive. A tiger like this one would have been known from travellers' prints, from the odd menagerie, and from other painters' versions, which is why these animals often look more heraldic than observed. The picture has never been pinned to one hand. It has been linked to the circle of Peter Paul Rubens and to the animal specialists who worked alongside him, among them Jan Wildens and Frans Snyders, but the Vienna academy still lists it without a firm name. What it shows is plain enough, a tigress lying with her young, watchful, her body curved around them.