Head of a lion

In 1819 Gericault was finishing the enormous Raft of the Medusa, the shipwreck canvas that would tower over that year's Salon. Between its human agonies he kept going back to the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, one of the first places where ordinary people could stand a few feet from a living big cat. This head came out of those visits. He worked from the animal in front of him rather than from older painters' stock beasts, and you can feel it in the weight of the skull and the fur pushed back into shadow. He was in his late twenties, already unwell, with only a few years left to live.