Young Tiger Playing with its Mother

Young Tiger Playing with its Mother (Jeune Tigre jouant avec sa mère) is a lithograph by Eugène Delacroix, made in 1831 for the Paris arts magazine L'Artiste; this impression bears the name of the printer Delaunois, and the image measures about 11 × 19 cm.

The print repeats, on a small scale, the composition of Delacroix's oil painting of 1830–1831, now in the Louvre. That canvas, his largest animal picture up to then, was shown at the Salon of 1831 and at an exhibition in the Palais du Luxembourg held for the benefit of citizens wounded in the July Revolution. Delacroix studied big cats at the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes, sometimes with his friend, the animal sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, and is also said to have watched his own cat closely. Its playful mood contrasts sharply with the violence of his Tiger Hunt.

The mother tiger lies stretched across the foreground with her head raised, while her cub tumbles over her back from the right, paws in the air. Delacroix worked up the striped fur with dense strokes and set the animals against a dark mass of foliage at the left that opens to a pale sky at the right. The lettering frames the image in the manner of the magazine plates: the journal's title above, Delacroix's name at lower left, the printer's at lower right and the title in script below.

The lithograph is number 91 in Loys Delteil's catalogue of Delacroix's prints, which records six states. Impressions with the Delaunois imprint are described as the first state; later states carry the address of the printer Bertauts and a differently lettered title. Impressions are held by, among others, the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden, the RISD Museum in Providence and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.