Lion painting

Explore our Lion painting collection.

Be inspired by the power of the lion with impressive lion paintings or lion wall art designed for all types of spaces and decor. Whether you’re looking for a simple sketch, a black and white lion painting or a full color masterpiece. You are bound to find a lion painting that will become a central element of your decor.
The majesty of the lion is something we all know.
King of the jungle and leader of the pride, the lion symbolizes power, strength and prowess, all qualities to which man aspires.
Representations of lions are in absolutely every culture. Some revered the lioness as the provider of the troop and the meaning of providence and skill in the hunt. In Egypt, for example, the Sphinx, with its lion body, was a representation of the Goddess who protected the pharaohs. The sun god Mithra was a solar deity associated with the lion and often depicted with a lion’s head.

Middle Eastern art indicates that the lion was associated with great kings. Gods and goddesses often had domesticated lions. This is the case with Ishtar, whose chariot is pulled by a lion, and Inanna, who stands on the back of two female lions. This type of lion painting evokes the lion as an emblem of strength and authority. It can be seen at the entrance to large cities, temples and gates, where statues in the shape of a lion are present to protect its inhabitants.

Representations of the ferocious animal are so common in art that they are overlooked.

Anyone who has visited Trafalgar Square in London knows that tourists tend to crowd around one particular feature: the four huge bronze lions, each weighing seven tons, at the foot of Nelson’s Column. They were designed by British painter and sculptor Edwin Landseer, who used the body of a dead lion from London Zoo as a model.

Landseer’s big cats are among the most famous lions in Western art. Indeed, artists have been creating lion paintings for millennia to the point that, as a motif, they are so commonplace that they are often overlooked.
For example, lions often appear as faithful companions in Saint Jerome’s paintings of lions. Rubens painted spectacular lion hunts. In Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy, a moonlit lion sniffs a sleeping figure near a mandolin. Meanwhile, a spectacular orange lion prowls the streets outside a prison in the Port of Spain in a lion painting by Scottish artist Peter Doig.

Lions are a staple of heraldry. An ancient bronze statue of a winged lion is the symbol of Venice. In the same city, a splendidly sleeping lion guards the monument of the sculptor Canova in the church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.

In short, the list of lions in art is endless. Earlier this year, Iranian sculptor Parviz Tanavoli organized an exhibition in Tehran featuring hundreds of lions in his country’s art. From sculptures to simple lion paintings, some of the exhibits were created thousands of years ago.

The Lion Man
What do all these representations of lions mean? And when did they become so popular? An exhibition exploring religious beliefs at the British Museum answers the latter question as it reveals that lions have been an essential element of visual representation since the dawn of artistic expression.

The proof is in the pudding. Here, it is not a simple lion painting. It is a 31 cm high ivory sculpture of a hybrid creature with a human body and a lion’s head, which was carved from the tusk of a mammoth 40,000 years ago. Its fragments were discovered in a cave in southwest Germany during the 20th century. Carefully reconstructed, it is now known as the “lion man”. It is a true masterpiece.

The Lion Man was probably based on observations of European cave lions, which, although now extinct, were abundant during the Ice Age, when they were top predators.

The British Museum reveals that, since the advent of written history, lions have once again played a major role in ancient art.
For some, the lion is one of the most important motifs in ancient art. The fawn dominates the megafauna of the ancient Near East, in art as well as in reality, from the end of the fourth millennium BCE. And in art, there are two versions of leonine power.