An oil painting that hung in a French family home for 150 years has sold for €455,000 at auction in Paris.
Specialists examined the brushwork and checked studio records from 1864 before confirming it was painted by Eugène Delacroix.
Six of the lions show intricate brushwork, while a seventh remains a light outline along the canvas edge.
However, without a verified trail of public gallery exhibitions, the painting remained classified as an unconfirmed family heirloom.
While public records do not document every private hand the painting passed through since 1864, the physical proof, studio marks, and estate catalog records fully establish its origin.
An oil painting that hung in a French family home for 150 years has sold for €455,000 at auction in Paris. The work had never been shown publicly until noticed by an auctioneer during a house inventory near Tours. Specialists examined the brushwork and checked studio records from 1864 before confirming it was painted by Eugène Delacroix. The sale ended more than a century and a half of private ownership and drew strong bidding at Hôtel Drouot.
Expert appraisal reveals hidden canvas
Auctioneer Malo de Lussac of the Daguerre Val de Loire auction house discovered the painting while evaluating an estate in Indre-et-Loire. The oil-on-canvas work measures 61 by 50 centimeters, or 24 by 20 inches, depicting seven resting lions against an ocher and dark brown landscape. Six of the lions show intricate brushwork, while a seventh remains a light outline along the canvas edge.
The family had suspected a connection to Delacroix, keeping a 1980s authentication letter from prominent scholar Lee Johnson inside their records along with an expert certificate. However, without a verified trail of public gallery exhibitions, the painting remained classified as an unconfirmed family heirloom. The family’s century-old ownership supported the claim, but art historians required physical and documentary proof before putting the master’s name on the catalog entry.
Physical proof and zoo studies confirm origin
To verify the attribution, art experts at Cabinet Turquin in Paris examined the physical canvas, frame, and paint layers. The 1864 catalog record from Delacroix’s estate sale provided the crucial paper trail, listing the painting as Lot 213 under the title Études de lions couchés.
Delacroix harbored a lifelong fascination with wild predators. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, he routinely visited the menagerie at Paris’s Jardin des Plantes alongside sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye. There, he spent hours sketching lions and tigers to study muscle movement, jaw anatomy, and natural body weight at rest. Collectors regularly trade his paper sketches and prints, but Delacroix rarely painted big cats in oil.
Traces of paint along the canvas edges and wooden stretcher further supported the attribution. Delacroix frequently used these unpainted border areas as test patches to mix pigments and test brush consistency before laying color onto the main composition.
Bidders push price past estimates
Daguerre and Cabinet Turquin displayed the painting at Hôtel Drouot in Paris before the March 28, 2025 sale. Given the canvas’s obscure history, the auction house set a conservative presale estimate of €200,000 to €300,000.
Bidders quickly drove the price past expectations. The winning buyer paid €455,000, including buyer fees, setting a strong result for an uncataloged oil study.
Reporting indicates an overseas buyer acquired the work, taking the canvas out of France. While public records do not document every private hand the painting passed through since 1864, the physical proof, studio marks, and estate catalog records fully establish its origin.
Source: Cabinet Turquin and Daguerre Catalog (Études de lions couchés, March 28, 2025); Drouot Sale Results (2025); Reporting by The Art Newspaper, Libération, and Ouest-France.
