The burnt picture

 

 

THE LION HUNT

 

- Eugène Delacroix - 1855 - Fragmentary reconstitution of the upper part of the painting. Oiled on burnt canvas.
(the lower part is currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bordeaux)

During the night of December 7th 1870, the upper section of "The Lion Hunt" was completely destroyed in the fierce blaze that gutted Bordeaux City Hall.
A few days after the fire, an employee unexpectedly unearthed from the rubble some strips of canvas, burnt to a cinder, which on closer inspection offered some strange likenesses to the shapes of the weapons for killing lions with painted at the top of the picture. A commission set up to shed light on the enigmatic origin of these pieces came up with three possibilities, but expressed no preference for any one or other of them.
They may be briefly summed up as follows:

1. these pieces of black canvas are just the result of one of those chance occurrences in which you see whatever you want to see;

2. for a perfect rendering of the metal blade of the sabres and daggers, Eugène Delacroix added lead to his colours, thus fire-proofing any piece of canvas covered with the mixture;

3. in light of the upended symbolism that has transformed our approach to the painting (before the fire, the warriors gave the impression of massacring the lion; afterwards, the lions would appear to have regained the upper hand), it may be a case of arson for purposes of relegitimising Animal Power (an idea in vogue in the 19th century), with the culprits cynically signing their foul deed by leaving these derisory shadows of the sacrilegious weapons for all to see.
The most astonishing thing however is the passionate attitude, to say the least, adopted by Odilon Redon over the mutilation of a painting with which he was of course perfectly familiar, having made a copy of it when it was still intact. Buried in his increasingly evanescent world view, Redon held the only tangible remains of a canvas that had gone up in smoke in such awe that (it is said) he had the montage presented opposite done in order to present it, sadly unsuccessfully, to the Bordeaux Museum of Fine Arts.