Lion Hunt

On 30 March 1863, a few months before Delacroix died, this canvas came up at an anonymous sale in Paris, and the firm of Durand-Ruel bought it, years before that name became famous as the dealer of the Impressionists. By 1867 it had crossed the Atlantic to Adolph Borie, a Philadelphia merchant who two years later spent a few months as Secretary of the Navy under President Grant. The picture is signed and dated 1858 in the lower right corner. It shows no real place and no real day, and the museum's own label now reads it as picturing North Africa as violent while leaving France's colonial rule there out of view. It was sold again at auction in New York in 1889, and in 1895 the museum bought it from Durand-Ruel, the same firm that had first bought it in Paris 32 years earlier.