La Chasse au tigre

Rubens built this around 1616 as one of four enormous hunting scenes for Maximilian of Bavaria, meant to line a hall of his palace at Schleissheim near Munich. Tiger, lion and leopard collide with mounted hunters in a single knot of muscle and terror, the canvas nearly three and a half metres across. Rubens had never seen most of these animals in the wild, few Europeans had, so he worked from studies of beasts kept in menageries and from earlier art, then flung them together with the swagger that made his hunts famous across Europe. The set was broken up during the Napoleonic wars, when French armies stripped collections across the continent, and this canvas was carried off to Rennes in Brittany, where it hangs today.