A 19th-century oil study of seven languorous lions once hung in a family’s living room. Now, after being newly attributed to the French Romantic icon Eugène Delacroix, the painting is heading to auction with a six-figure pre-sale estimate.
“The Owners Weren’t Sure it was a Delacroix”
This week, the Daguerre Val de Loire auction house in Paris announced the attribution of a previously unknown oil study to Eugène Delacroix, a 19th-century painter who was considered the leader of the French Romantic school. Auctioneer Malo de Lusac discovered Study of Reclining Lions while conducting an inventory at a property in Tours, France. The two-foot-tall oil study has belonged to the same family since the posthumous sale of Delacroix’s studio in 1864. “The owners weren’t sure it was a Delacroix,” de Lussac told Agence-France Presse. “When I arrived in the living room, my gaze was drawn to its magnetism. It was very moving. We see works by Delacroix very regularly in museums but very few in private hands.”
De Lussac also told Libération, “While searching, we found two documents: one from Lee Johnson, a Delacroix specialist dating from the 1980s attesting to the work’s authenticity, as well as an expert certificate.” Now that it has been officially attributed to Delacroix, Study of Reclining Lions is estimated to sell for between $217,000 and $326,000 (€200,000 to €300,000) when it hits the auction block on March 28 at Hôtel Drouot in Paris. It will be on public view there starting the day before.
Eugène Delacroix and Paintings of Cats
Eugéne Delacroix is among the most formidable fixtures in French art. While he is perhaps best known for his revolutionary masterpiece Liberty Leading the People, he also frequently gravitated towards lions and other big cats. Delacroix could often be found studying animals at the menagerie in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes and observing animal dissections. He produced many ink sketches and studies of lions, but painted versions like Study of Reclining Lions are much more rare, according to the auction house. In the oil study, Delacroix painted seven lions in various states of rest—mostly lying on the ground, with one seated.
Interestingly, three of Delacroix’s top 10 public sale prices are for paintings of big cats. Tiger with a Tortoise set the artist’s auction high, bringing in $9,875,000 at Christie’s New York in 2018. The painting came to auction from the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller.
