Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Eugène Delacroix
French; 19th-century
Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery
74%
Lion. c1840s. Oil on canvas
The colors are a little moody but I guess that's a silly thing to complain about with Delacroix. What isn't silly to complain about is how his single-figure studies like this one often fail to hold up against his busier pictures, which put to work much more effectively all the melding colors, hyperpresent brushwork, and sporadic layers of paint. Especially in the background of this painting, Delacroix's handling is surely fast and expressive, but strokes are not sufficiently organized to go beyond the simple impact of their physical presence (cf. Cézanne on this score). The lion, however, is presented with a singularity of presence that befits the painting's genre as a "study," but there's also a multiplicity to its form that undercuts this productively. In other words, the lion is clearly one thing but it's been painted to look like it's many things. See the scumbling on its mane, or that abyss between its body and its back leg... and yet it's cutting such a figure. The greatest single effect in the painting is the way Delacroix's built the lion's head so as to seem cocked. It's not anything about its composition, however, that makes it appear so, but rather it's all in the application of the paint: heavier on one ear than the other; shifting thickness to the mane as it rims around the face; dragged more on the one side of the face than the other. (TFS, 2025)