Chasse aux lions

In February 1864, six months after Delacroix died, the contents of his studio were auctioned in Paris, and his cousin, the painter Léon Riesener, bought this canvas. It is the oil sketch for a huge lion hunt that the French state ordered from him in 1854 for the Paris world's fair of 1855. The finished painting belongs to the museum in Bordeaux, and only part of it is left, because a fire in 1870 destroyed its upper section. Here the whole design survives, with changes the painter was still trying out. Riders, horses and lions are knotted into one struggling mass, and in the middle a lion leaps up at a rider. When Riesener's own collection was sold in 1879, this canvas was withdrawn from the sale and stayed with his family for decades. The French national museums bought it in 1984 from the New York collector Eugene Thaw.