Horse Attacked by a Lioness

A pale horse has been thrown onto its back, legs kicking in the air, and a lioness is on top of it. The whole fight is packed into a canvas about 43 centimetres wide, with nothing around it but dark earth and a few flicks of lit foliage. The Louvre dates it only broadly, to somewhere between 1825 and 1850, the decades when animals locked in combat became one of Delacroix's favourite subjects for small pictures. There is no hunter, no landscape to speak of, and no story beyond the struggle itself. The canvas carries the stamp of Beugniet, a Paris picture dealer who handled work of this kind, and the signature is in the lower left corner, half lost in the shadow.