La Chasse aux lions au Maroc

In 1832 Delacroix spent a few months in Morocco and Algeria with a French diplomatic mission, and the light, horses, and crowds of North Africa fed his imagination for the rest of his life. He painted this lion hunt in 1861, nearly 30 years later and only two years before his death. There was never such a hunt in front of him. It is built from memory and from his love of Rubens, whose great hunting scenes he had studied, packed into a tangle of men, horses, and lions where you can barely tell where one body ends and the next begins. At the centre a lion twists back on the hunter dragging it down. He had used almost the same turning lion in a far larger version made for Bordeaux, the upper part of which later burned in a fire.