Up for auction today at a swanky Parisian auction house will be a slightly lazy paint sketch of some lions.
But these relaxed beasts are more than they appear. As it turns out, the work entitled Study of Reclining Lions was a lost creation from one of Paris’ greatest ever modern painters: Eugène Delacroix.
The man whose hand wielded the brush that gave the world Liberty Leading the People, Delacroix also painted these 7 lions in a swirl of brown and ochre savannah, but after a 1830 sale following his death, the work disappears from records.
It turned up during an appraisal at a home in France’s central region of Touraine conducted by Malo de Lussac.
“The owners were not sure that it was a Delacroix,” de Lussac tells Agence France-Presse. “When I arrived in the living room, my gaze was attracted by his magnetism. It was very moving. Delacroix’s works are seen very regularly in museums but very little in private hands.”
Sophia Anderson at the Smithsonian Magazine reports that Delacroix loved very much to observe the tigers and lions kept in the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
“How necessary it is to … stick one’s head out of doors and try to read from creation, which has nothing in common with cities and the works of man,” Delacroix once wrote, and Anderson shared.
OTHER LOST PAINTINGS FOUND:
Up for auction at Hôtel Drouot auctioneers, the estimate is between €200,000 and €300,000.
“Over the course of his career, Eugène Delacroix produced numerous studies of fauves [wild animals] either for their own sake or for inclusion in a scene with figures,” writes Lee Johnson in The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, 1816-1831. “In 1829, he considered a composition on this theme for the Salon, hesitating whether to paint lions or tigers at rest, in contrast to the academic subjects of fighting and hunting. He finally opted for the latter, and exhibited a Young Tiger Playing with its Mother.“
SHARE Yet Another Lost Work Of Art Appearing For The Benefit Of History…