Lion Hunt

Eugène Delacroix · 1860–61

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

76.5 × 98.5 cm (30 × 38 1/2 in.); Framed: 105.5 × 125.8 cm (41 1/2 × 49 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Few paintings in Western art match the raw, churning energy of Delacroix's Lion Hunt — a canvas that feels less like a composed scene and more like a collision of bodies, muscle, and mortal terror. Delacroix was the great champion of Romanticism, and this late work shows his mastery at its most uninhibited. His brushwork is loose and urgent, colour laid on in slashing strokes that dissolve form into movement — horses rearing, hunters lunging, lions twisting in fury. The composition owes a debt to Rubens, whose own hunting scenes Delacroix had studied deeply, but the emotional temperature here runs hotter, the chaos more visceral. The painting is one of several large-scale lion hunts Delacroix produced after his transformative 1832 journey to Morocco, where he filled notebooks with studies of horses, riders, and big cats observed firsthand — a rarity among European painters of his era. This hand-painted oil reproduction is rendered on canvas with the same medium Delacroix used, allowing the gestural energy of his brushwork to translate directly rather than being flattened by print. What arrives is a living image, not a facsimile.