Arab Horseman Attacked by a Lion

Eugène Delacroix · 1849–50

Medium

Oil on panel

Original size

43.9 × 38.1 cm (17 1/4 × 15 in.); Framed: 63.9 × 55.3 × 8.3 cm (25 1/8 × 21 3/4 × 3 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Few paintings in the Romantic canon match the raw kinetic energy of Delacroix's *Arab Horseman Attacked by a Lion*, a small panel that crackles with the kind of violent urgency usually reserved for works ten times its size. Delacroix was obsessed with the natural world as a theatre of struggle, and his 1832 journey to Morocco left a permanent mark on his imagination — the heat, the horses, the unpredictable violence of open desert became recurring subjects for the rest of his career. Working in oil on panel, he could build up dense, gestural strokes with unusual directness, and the result here is a composition that feels almost instantaneous: horse, rider, and lion locked in a single explosive moment, the figures barely contained by the frame. The painting now held at the Art Institute of Chicago is one of several variations Delacroix returned to on this theme across three decades, a subject he clearly could not put down. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on the same panel-sized format, preserving the concentrated intensity and the rich amber-to-shadow tonal range that makes the original so arresting — a faithful recreation made by hand, one careful brushstroke at a time.