Lion and Wild Boar

Delacroix learned his lions in Paris, at the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes, where animals shipped in from the colonies were kept where the public could stand and watch them. When a lion died there in 1828 he and his friend the sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye took the body and dissected it, drawing the muscles under the skin. He signed and dated this small canvas 25 years later, in 1853, when most of his working time was going into the ceiling of the Salon de la Paix at the Paris town hall, a decoration that burned with the building in 1871. Between the two came Morocco. He spent six months there in 1832 with a French diplomatic mission, and the animal subjects only multiplied afterwards.