Lion dévorant un lapin

Delacroix kept going back to the same place in Paris, the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes, where for the first time ordinary artists could watch live lions and tigers up close. He sketched the big cats there for decades, sometimes beside the sculptor Antoine Barye, learning how a predator actually moves rather than how heraldry says it should. This small canvas from 1853 is the distilled result. A lion has pinned a rabbit under a rock and bends to feed, all the energy pushed into the shoulders and jaw. There is no story around it, no hunt, no landscape to speak of, just the animal and its kill. Delacroix was in his mid-fifties by then and painting these creatures partly from memory, partly from the hundreds of studies he had already made.