A Young Tiger Playing with Its Mother
Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) · 1830
A tigress lies on the ground in a rocky landscape and turns her great head towards her cub, which crouches against her flank, one paw raised in play. The two animals fill almost the whole width of the canvas. Behind them are dry bushes, a bare tree and a sky of warm evening light. The cub's stripes are soft and blurred, the mother's sharp; her ear is turned back, her mouth slightly open, and the wrinkle of her muzzle tells you she is watching rather than sleeping.
Delacroix painted the picture in eighteen thirty, the year of the July Revolution, and signed and dated it at the lower left. He had been drawing the big cats at the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes with his friend the sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, and he set down what he saw with a new freedom. Look at the fur: long, loaded strokes of ochre, black and white, dragged across one another so that the coat seems to move. The landscape is barely more than a stage. The real subject is the animal body, its weight and its latent violence, the same energy that runs through his lion hunts of later years.
The painting was bought or commissioned by the collector Auguste Thuret for fifteen hundred francs and exhibited in October eighteen thirty at the Luxembourg palace in a show for the wounded of the July days, then at the Salon of eighteen thirty one under the title Study of Two Tigers. Thuret bequeathed it to the Louvre in eighteen eighty one with a life interest for his heirs, and it entered the museum in nineteen hundred and three. It is one of the first great animal paintings of French Romanticism.
Did You Know? Delacroix studied his tigers at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris alongside the sculptor Barye, and he said that watching the big cats made him happier than anything.
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