Art Institute of Chicago

Lion Devouring a Horse

Eugène Delacroix

Date

1844

Medium

Lithograph in black on ivory China paper laid down on white wove paper

Culture

France

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Eugène Delacroix’s black-and-white lithographs are almost coloristic in their dramatic explosions of painterly tone. The artist, violently opposed to the careful linear styles espoused by the Royal Academy (as represented by Jean-August-Dominique Ingres and Jacques-Louis David), not only drew his animal prints directly onto the lithographic stone, but also clawed and scraped into them to create further highlights. This Orientalizing print was made twelve years after a seven-month journey through Spain, Morocco, and Algeria and was likely inspired by a combination of memory, imagination, and examination of the Barbary lions at the zoo in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes.

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