Lion Hunt

In 1855 Paris put on its first world's fair, an answer to London's Great Exhibition of four years earlier. Delacroix was given a retrospective room of his own there, and the largest lion hunt he ever painted hung in it. That canvas is now a fragment. A fire in Bordeaux in 1870 burned away its upper half. This smaller picture, signed in the same year of 1855, holds the same moment, the instant before the kill, with horses, riders and lion locked into one turning knot. Delacroix had crossed Morocco in 1832 with a French diplomatic mission and filled notebooks with horsemen and landscape, but he never watched a hunt like this one. For the lions he went to the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.