Tiger Hunt, Elephant Mounted by Indians – Antoine-Louis Barye (c. 1836)

A tiger leaps onto an elephant in a cloud of golden dust. In this dramatic watercolour, Antoine-Louis Barye shows a hunt in India at its most violent moment: a tiger has sprung onto the back of a war elephant and claws at the hunters clinging to its howdah, while a second tiger is crushed beneath the animal’s feet. The elephant twists, its trunk raised, in a vast landscape bathed in warm ochre light.

Barye painted this scene around 1836, at the time he was working on the same subject in bronze: a tiger hunt was one of the groups he created for the great table centrepiece commissioned by the Duke of Orléans. The watercolour, now in the Baltimore Museum of Art, has all the energy of his sculptures, with its knot of bodies, muscles and claws.

Barye, the master of wild animals

Antoine-Louis Barye (1796-1875) was the great Romantic animal sculptor of the 19th century. A friend of Delacroix, with whom he drew the big cats of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, he brought to sculpture and painting the fury and grace of lions, tigers and jaguars.

• Artist: Antoine-Louis Barye (1796-1875)
• Date: c. 1836
• Technique: watercolour and gouache
• Collection: Baltimore Museum of Art
• Format: horizontal
• Theme: tiger, elephant, hunt, India

A powerful print for a living room or a study. It pairs well with Delacroix’s Tiger and Royal Tiger. More in our classic painting prints. Printed on thick matte archival paper, in 13 sizes from A4 to A0. Free shipping, no minimum order. Shipped rolled in a sturdy tube.