An oil study depicting a lion has officially been attributed to Eugène Delacroix, a key figure of the Romanticist movement of the 19th century, and will now head to sale in France.
The Daguerre Val de Loire auction house announced the attribution this week, saying that the owners of the oil study didn’t previously know that they held a Delacroix. The study now could sell for as much as $325,800.
According to auctioneer Malo de Lussac, the study had long been displayed in the living room of a home in the French city of Tours. “The owners weren’t sure it was a Delacroix: when I arrived in the living room, my gaze was drawn to its magnetism,” he told Agence-France Presse. “It was very moving. We see works by Delacroix very regularly in museums but very few in private hands.”
Per de Lussac, the family was aware that Delacroix may have painted the study. “While searching,” de Lussac told Libération, “we found two documents: one from Lee Johnson, a Delacroix specialist dating from the 1980s attesting to the work’s authenticity, as well as an expert certificate.” Newly conducted research left him feeling confident that it was indeed a Delacroix.
Johnson, who died in 2006, is often considered one of the most important scholars with a focus on Delacroix’s work, having published a definitive series of books that catalog many of his works during the ’80s.
Even if the study does hit its high estimate, it would fall far beneath Delacroix’s auction record, which was set in 2018 by his 1862 painting Tigre jouant avec une tortue (Tiger Playing with a Tortoise). That painting came to sale from the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller, and sold for $9.88 million.
It’s not the first time de Lussac has said he discovered a work that he credited to a famed historical painter. In 2023, he found a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger behind a door in French home. He claimed at the time that its owners merely thought they had on their hands a copy; in fact, de Lussac said, it was the real deal.
