Lioness Ripping Apart an Arab's Chest
Original Language TitleLionne Déchirant la Poitrine d'un Arabe
Artist
Eugène Delacroix
(French, 1798 - 1863)
Date1849
MediumSoft-ground etching; printed in sanguine ink on paper
DimensionsImage: 5 7/8 × 10 5/8 inches (14.92 × 26.99 cm)
Sheet: 6 9/16 × 11 3/16 inches (16.67 × 28.42 cm)
Sheet: 6 9/16 × 11 3/16 inches (16.67 × 28.42 cm)
Credit LineGift of John Donnelly
Object numberF84-9/1
On View
Not on viewCollections
Exhibition HistoryGifts to the Prints Collection in Recent Years, November 21, 1993-January 9, 1994, no cat.
In the 1800s, French writers such as
Apollinaire, Balzac, and Verlaine likened the mysterious and predatory nature
of cats to women as a way to express their concerns about women’s growing social
mobility and independence. These fears and the period’s interest in Orientalism
(Western depictions of the Middle East and Asia) converge in Delacroix’s print.
Large wildcats such as the lioness might have evoked the femme fatale because both figures are at once beautiful and
destructive. Men were at their mercy.
John Donnelly, by February 2, 1984;
His gift to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1984.
George L. McKenna, Prints, 1460-1995 (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,
1996), 292.
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is based upon historic information and may not be currently accurate or complete.
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