A Young Tiger Playing with its Mother

Delacroix painted these two tigers in 1830, the year Paris rose in the July Revolution and he set to work on Liberty Leading the People. Away from the barricades, he spent hours at the menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes, the city's zoo, sketching big cats beside his friend the sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, who studied animals for his bronzes. What he brought back wasn't a hunt or an attack. The grown tiger stretches on her back while the young one paws at her, both of them at ease. He later reworked the same pair as a lithograph for the art journal L'Artiste.