Lion Devouring a Horse

Lion Devouring a Horse — Eugène Delacroix. 1844.

Medium: Lithograph in black on ivory China paper laid down on white wove paper. Dimensions: Image: 17 × 23.5 cm (6 3/4 × 9 5/16 in.); Sheet: 30.5 × 45 cm (12 1/16 × 17 3/4 in.).

Collection record: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.

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.

Description: © Art Institute of Chicago, original record, CC BY 4.0. HTML formatting removed; wording retained. Other artwork metadata: CC0.

Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.