Delacroix published his famous lithograph of a Royal Tiger in 1829, one of the great images of Romantic art. We have not been able to identify the monogrammist 'EG' who made this copy in the year the lithograph was published, but it is certainly period, possibly by an English admirer. Delacroix had great empathy with the natural world and was fascinated by animals, although he seems never to have encountered untamed ones in the wild, even during his trip to Morocco in 1832. Having to rely upon the resources of the Paris zoo, he began studying big cats there in the late 1820s, probably not long before making this lithograph.

In this terrible, beautiful picture, Delacroix endulged the Romantic penchant for tragedy, torment, and violence in scenes that showed nature "red in tooth and claw" some decades before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859).