EMULATION AND REPETITION IN 19TH CENTURY ART
 

This disruption of long established modes of understanding the animal world and man’s relationship to it is apparent in Delacroix’s depictions of animals and people alike. While traditional symbolism discusses lions and tigers as just kings and skulking villains respectively, Delacroix’s paintings of animals and people alike blur those moral distinctions. As Nancy Finlay notes in her 1984 dissertation Animal Themes in the Painting of Eugene Delacroix, the pendent to the painting of the Royal Tiger is the Atlas Lion (Lion Devouring a Rabbit) (c. 1851-56, Musée du Louvre) (Fig. 8) which depicts the so-called king of beasts with a rabbit, an image that has traditionally referred to the benevolence of kings. Delacroix’s painting however undermines this reading by making it clear that violence is imminent. (Finlay 1984, 58) This inversion of the viewer’s expectations typifies the way in which Delacroix uses references to traditional precedents to reconcile human and animal nature. Finlay continues this argument and suggests that this inversion of expectation and association between man and beast is evident in the artist’s figural work. Finlay points out that the artist’s depiction of Medea about to Kill Her Children (1838, Musee du Louvre) (Fig. 9) is described as a lioness, an ancient symbol of a mother’s fierce protectiveness for her offspring. As Finlay notes, Medea’s anxious body-language and the absence of the pursuers evokes the compositional motifs commonly associated with the lioness. This interpretation seems even more poignant when one considers that Delacroix’s Medea is not protecting her children, but rather is about to murder them herself (Finlay 1984, 75). In inverting these symbols and the viewer’s expectations Delacroix creates works that are striking not only for their dynamism and energy, but in complicating the way in which the viewer must actively respond to the painting.


The romantic period was one enormous uncertainty and violence in France, something that is expressed in an art of great contrasts and dichotomies exemplified by Delacroix’s Royal Tiger. Delacroix should be remembered perhaps not as the artist who broke all the rules, but rather as the artist who rewrote them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Crow, Thomas. 2007 “Patriotism to Virtue: David to the Young Ingres” Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical
History 3rd ed. Edited by Stephen F. Eisenman. New York City: Thames & Hudson: 18-54.

Finlay, Nancy Ann. 1984 “Animal Themes in the Painting of Eugene Delacroix” PhD. Diss., Princeton
            University.

Johnson, Dorothy. 2001 “Delacroix’s Dialogue with the French Classical Tradition” The Cambridge
Companion to Delacroix. Edited by Beth S. Wright. Cambridge University Press: 108-129.

Johnson, Lee. 1964 “Delacroix, Bayre and ‘The Tower Menagerie’: An English Influence on French
            Romantic Animal Pictures” The Burlington Magazine no. 106: 416-419.

Kliman, Eve Twose. 1982 “Delacroix’s Lions and Tigers: A Link between Man and Nature” The Art Bulletin
no. 64: 446-466.

Mras, George P. Eugéne Delacroix’s Theory of Art. 1966. Princeton University Press.

--------------------. 1962. “A Crouching Royal Tiger by Delacroix” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton
            University no. 21: 16-24. 

Serullaz, Arlette., Vincent Pomarede and Louis-Antoine Prat. “Catalogue” in Delacroix: The Late
Work 1998.  Edited by Jane Watkins. Philadelphia Museum of Art: 75-314.

Next

Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3.
Figure 4. Figure 5. Figure 6.
Figure 7. Figure 8. Figure 9.
Eugène Delacroix, Atlas Lion (Lion Devouring a Rabbit