Girl being mauled by a tiger

By 1856 Delacroix had not seen North Africa in 24 years, yet he was still painting it. The six months he spent in Morocco and Algeria in 1832, travelling with a French diplomatic mission not long after France took Algiers, gave him a private store of colour and light he drew on for the rest of his life. This small canvas is one of those late returns. A dark-haired woman in a red cloak is dragged down by a tiger at the edge of a clearing, the whole scene glimpsed as if from a boat lying just offshore. Delacroix was in his late 50s here, often unwell, working in his Paris studio far from the heat that first set these images loose.