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Artist or Maker: Verboeckhoven, Eugene Joseph (1798-1881)

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Notes: VARIOUS PROPERTIES
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One of the most successful animal painters of his time, Verboeckhoeven modernised the spirit of 17th Century Dutch animal painters such as Paulus Potter by imbuing his works with a profoundly Romantic spirit.

The theme of big cats attacking horses was a favoured motif of French Romantic artists such as Eugène Delacroix (fig. 1) and Horace Vernet, and poets such as Byron. The subject was widely interpreted as a metaphor for the great struggles of civilisation -- for example between Greeks and Turks, or between Christianity and Islam -- which these same artists also treated. Like Verboeckhoven, they also drew on the turbulent and expressive lion hunt paintings of Peter Paul Rubens, before placing them in the North African or Orientalist context for which they were so famed.

If Verboeckhoven's Orientalist setting was influenced by his French Romantic contemporaries, the composition itself is clearly inspired by George Stubbs' treatment of the same subject (fig. 2), which the artist would certainly have known - either from prints or just as likely from one of his many trips to London. As an animal painter above all else, Verboeckhoven was enormously popular with English lovers of the genre; they would have admired in him a fusion of the anthropomorphic qualities that they sought in the works of Edwin Landseer, and the more romantic spirit of James Ward.

Like Stubbs, Verboeckhoven also paid enormous attention to anatomical detail. He studied big cats in their enclosures in London, setting them into fantastical, Rubenesque compositions of lions fighting tigers, or attacking other animals in violent life and death struggles such as that depicted in the present work.

Verboeckhoven here treats in a slighly different composition a subject that he had tackled on the same scale in a painting of 1855, Fight between a rearing horse and a roaring lion. Both compositions feature the same cactus plant in the foreground, while the lion is depicted in a similar position, the artist giving emphasis to his powerful claws and daggered teeth. Verboeckhoven has built a powerful image, contrasting the taut body and terrified features of the horse against the brute power of its attacker.