Tigre con una tortuga

Delacroix painted this in 1862, the year before he died, and it gathers a lifetime of looking. For decades he had gone to the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, sitting for hours to learn how a big cat's muscles gather and shift, and tigers had prowled through his canvases since his youth as the young firebrand of French Romantic painting. What is new here is the tortoise, an animal he had never paired with a tiger before. The great striped cat lowers its head toward the slow armoured thing in the grass, curious more than hungry. The light is hot and close, an imagined corner of the tropics conjured from a Paris zoo and a very long memory of it.