In search of adventure

Paintings sometimes depicted emotional moments experienced during trips to Africa, conveying the sense of a mysterious destination. During his visit to Algeria in 1848, Louis Matout witnessed a dramatic scene, which he recreated on a huge canvas and presented at the Universal Exposition in 1855, making a huge impression on visitors. The journalist Léon de Lora wrote about it in Le Gaulois in 1874 : "One day, the travellers stayed with a tribe. As night fell, they heard a loud noise coming from the nearby well. Everyone ran over to it and there they saw a woman who had been attacked and killed by a lioness, which was still lying there beside her (...) The woman's husband was one of the onlookers ; he grabbed his gun and shot the lioness which ran away wounded (...).

Matout, who slept on the lioness's skin, turned this moving scene into a painting which hangs in the Palais du Luxembourg."