Puma

Delacroix was past 60 and often unwell when he made this small panel in 1859, four years before he died. For most of his life he had gone to the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris to watch the big cats, first in the late 1820s with his friend the sculptor Barye, and still in his last years, drawing, as he put it, in the sunshine among the crowd after the lions. All that watching sits behind this crouching animal, tense and low, gathered to spring. The museum itself is not certain what it is looking at. The picture carries two names, Le Puma and, just as often, a lioness watching her prey, so even the species stays an open question at the Musée d'Orsay.