Royal Tiger

Eugène Delacroix

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Delacroix had great empathy with the natural world and was fascinated by animals, although he seems never to have encountered untamed ones in the wild, even during his trip to Morocco in 1832. Having to rely upon the resources of the Paris zoo, he began studying felines there in the late 1820s, probably not long before making this lithograph. In this terrible, beautiful picture, Delacroix demonstrated the Romantic penchant for tragedy, torment, and violence in scenes that showed nature "red in tooth and claw" some decades before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859).

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art