The Lion Roars: Jeremy Irons on Rembrandt’s Young Lion Resting

Clearly drawn from life, this majestic study of a young lion, which embodies all the power, poise and restless vitality of this noble creature, combines in a unique way Rembrandt's twin geniuses for depicting nature in its most essential state of beauty, and for seeing to the very heart of his subjects of every type.

Dating from the late 1630s or the early to mid-1640s, a period when Rembrandt’s originality, creative energy and technical skill knew no bounds, it is one of only six drawings of lions by Rembrandt that are known today; the others are all in museum collects ions, in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Rapidly executed with great spontaneity – particularly evident in the lion’s left paw, which has been drawn in two different positions – the drawing at the same t.mes conveys an arresting combination of calmness and intensity, most strikingly in the lion’s gaze, locked onto something just to the viewer’s left. Somehow, through these few strokes of the chalk and touches of the brush, we not only see the lion’s exterior form, but also glimpse its very soul. This is a profound and moving portrait; it may depict a lion, but it reveals as much of the true essence of its subject as any portrait of a human sitter.

That Rembrandt's encounter with this lion is realised here as a drawing is central to the work's extraordinary impact: freed from the layered mediation of paint, the image records the artist’s first, most immediate act of looking, allowing the viewer to engage with the lion as Rembrandt himself did, in a single, charged moment of observation and understanding.

The first Rembrandt drawing of a lion to come to the market in a century, the only drawing by him of any animal that remains in private hands, and the most significant drawing of any kind by Rembrandt to be offered at auction in a generation, the proceeds from its sale will benefit Panthera, the world’s leading organisation dedicated to the conservation of wild cats.

Rembrandt’s drawings of animals
Although hardly fifteen drawings of animals by Rembrandt, and just six of lions, are known today, he must have made more. Studies like this would have been essential in furthering his understanding of the natural world and his ability to incorporate its elements in totally convincing ways into his compositions of other types.

The inventory of Rembrandt’s possessions, compiled at the t.mes of his financial difficulties in 1656, lists “A ditto [art book] full of drawings by Rembrandt, consisting of animals [drawn] from life.”³ The animal studies that are known today include: rapid sketches of a dog⁴ and of horses⁵, the former in black chalk, the latter in the combination of red and black chalk more typical of Rembrandt’s early period in Leiden; three fine black chalk studies of an elephant⁶; pen and ink studies of pigs⁷, and of birds of paradise⁸; and the six drawings of lions. Of the lion drawings, three are executed in the very distinctive, powerful combination of media seen here (the other two of which are in the British Museum⁹), while three, most likely dating from a later phase of Rembrandt’s career, are drawn in pen and brown ink and wash.

According to the catalogue of his collects ion, compiled around 1722, the art dealer Jan Pietersz. Zomer (1641–1724) owned nineteen drawings of lions by Rembrandt, though it is likely that these included drawings then thought to be by Rembrandt, but which we would today consider to be the work of one of his pupils.¹⁰ Various such drawings, either copied from originals by Rembrandt or made at the same t.mes , have survived¹¹ and Constantijn van Renesse (1626–80), a pupil of Rembrandt around 1650, made a drawing with lions based on those drawn by his teacher in a portrayal of Daniel in the Lions’ Den.¹² Later still, in 1729, Bernard Picart (1673-1733) published his Recueil de Lions, a series of 42 prints depicting lions, eighteen of which are identified as being after drawings by Rembrandt, perhaps those previously owned by Zomer. The two black chalk drawings of lions in London were engraved, in reverse, for Picart’s series, but not the present sheet.¹³ Finally, the 1800 sale of the collects ion of Cornelis Ploos van Amstel (1726–98) also lists 14 drawings of lions by Rembrandt.¹⁴

None of the six surviving drawings of lions, however, bears the collects or’s mark of either Ploos van Amstel or Zomer, so it is not possible to establish with certainty the route that any of them took before they emerged, at various points between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, in The Netherlands, France and England.¹⁵ According to the files of the Netherlands Art History Institute (RKD), in The Hague, the Young Lion Resting was one of a significant group of Rembrandt drawings in the collects ion of the French artist Jean-Jacques de Boissieu (1736-1810), who was greatly influenced, especially in his printmaking, by the works of his illustrious Dutch predecessor.¹⁶ Later, it belonged to the charismatic French dealer and collects or, Robert Lebel (1901-1986), friend of André Breton and first biographer of Marcel Duchamp, the last part of whose collects ion was sold at Replica Shoes ’s in Paris in 2009.¹⁷

Rembrandt’s lions: style and chronology
The Leiden collects ion Young Lion Resting is extremely comparable in technique and style to the two drawings of lionesses seen lying in profile, one of them apparently about to devour a bird that it holds in its paws, in the British Museum (Figs. 1 and 2). In all three drawings, which may well have been made on the same occasion, Rembrandt has employed the same combination of materials: a dense, black chalk (or possibly charcoal¹⁸), treated with some kind of oily binding material, with the addition of tonal touches in gray wash, and carefully placed highlights in white bodycolor. Prior to the application of the chalks and the gray wash, the paper has been lightly toned with brown wash, something that Rembrandt did with some regularity, though more usually in the context of his landscape drawings.

The Young Lion Resting differs, however, from the two British Museum drawings in that the lion is shown here not from the side but in three-quarters profile, which not only instils a greater dynamic energy but also gives the artist the possibility of focussing attention much more on the face and eyes of the lion. Indeed, the eyes, with their astonishingly intense gaze, are the absolute key to the drawing’s exceptional power as an image, and emotional strength. Rembrandt has also varied the chalk strokes that he used in different areas of the drawing to emphasise still further the intensity and power of the lion’s stare. Much of the animal’s body he has sketched very rapidly, with long, powerful chalk strokes that impart a sense of both energy and movement (the latter also conveyed by the way that the lion’s left paw is sketched first in one position and then in another), but in the lion’s face and head, in contrast, the chalk strokes are much smaller and more tightly controlled, conveying a sense of total stillness that not only highlights the lion’s concentration but also somehow alludes to the menace implicit in its stare. Right now, this lion is at rest, but at any moment it could pounce – were it not for the chain around its neck, attached with a strong rope to an invisible cage.

In the British Museum drawing of the lioness facing to the right (fig. 2), we see the same restraints, and indeed the proportions of the animal are so similar that it is reasonable to conclude that the lion depicted is one and the same. The other British Museum drawing seems, however, to show a lion with a longer, slimmer body and less hair around the neck. Both the London drawings have always been described as images of lionesses, but there does seem to be a difference between the two animals, and the plausible suggestion that the Leiden collects ion drawing actually depicts a young male lion, with the beginnings of a mane, can also be convincingly applied to the London drawing in which the lion faces to the right.

Rembrandt’s three other surviving drawings of lions are entirely different, both as regards their technique and in their approach to the subject. Perhaps the most impressive is the Study of a Lion at Rest, in the Louvre (fig. 3), which shows a large, shaggy-maned male lion at rest.¹⁹ Broadly drawn in pen and brown ink with two shades of brown wash, this drawing can be associated stylistically with a rather different, later period in Rembrandt’s career, and probably dates from the later 1640s or early 1650s. The same can be said of the Recumbent Lion now in Rotterdam (fig. 4)²⁰, while the study of a lion in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (fig. 5), more sparsely drawn with just the point of the brush, must date from later still, most likely around 1660.²¹

Lions in Rembrandt’s paintings and prints
The generally accepted view that the Leiden collects ion Young Lion Resting and the associated drawings in the British Museum date from the late 1630s or early 1640s is based both on stylistic comparisons with other drawings by Rembrandt from this period, and on the suggestion that there is a link, if only a loose one, between these lion drawings and Rembrandt’s spectacular if somewhat enigmatic monochrome painting of 1637-45, known as The Concord of the State (fig. 6), in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam.²² In the left foreground of that painting, a prominently-placed lion - which would have been immediately recognised as symbolising the Dutch state - lies chained in a manner reminiscent of the present drawing, and snarls outwards at the viewer. Though no surviving drawing can be considered a direct study for the lion in this painting, the generally similar way that it lies, and is bound, has been taken as indicating that the black chalk drawings predate the completion of the painting.²³ Yet it must be noted that there is a world of difference between the totally lifelike way that the lions in the drawings look, lie and appear to move, and the much more unrealistic appearance of the lion in the painting, which does not, in all honesty, give the impression that that person who painted it had ever seen a real lion.

Unfortunately, Rembrandt did not depict a lion in any other painting, but they do appear in several of his prints, from different periods in his career. One of the earliest is the 1634 etching of Saint Jerome (fig. 7), which includes an extremely strange animal that must be intended to represent the lion that usually appears in depictions of the saint, but is hardly recognisable as such.²⁴ Much the same can be said of the lions in the two versions of the even earlier print of The Small Lion Hunt (c. 1629)²⁵, and even in The Large Lion Hunt of 1641 the snarling lion – which looks very much like the one in the Rotterdam painting – is only slightly more true to life.²⁶ It is only when we reach the print of Saint Jerome Reading in an Italian Landscape (fig. 8), executed considerably later, around 1653, that we see for the first t.mes a truly lifelike representation of a lion in any work by Rembrandt that is not a drawing.²⁷ The majestic, mature lion in that later print does, though, resemble the ones seen in the pen and wash drawings in Paris and Rotterdam far more than it does the three earlier chalk drawings that include the Leiden collects ion’s Young Lion Resting.

Comparisons with drawings by Rembrandt of other subjects can also be helpful when attempting to determine the most convincing dating for the present drawing, as the artist only rarely employed the combination of media that we see here. The bold way in which he has used white heightening to help create strongly sculptural modelling and dramatic lighting is particularly unusual, but strikingly similar white highlighting, though this t.mes in conjunction with red chalk rather than black, can be seen in the superb preparatory drawing for Rembrandt’s etched portrait of Cornelis Claesz. Anslo, which is signed and dated 1640.²⁸

Also unusual is the very dense, greasy black chalk, and possibly also charcoal, that the artist has used for much of the drawing. This has parallels in Rembrandt’s three black chalk drawings of elephants, one of which, in the Albertina in Vienna, is dated 1637 (fig. 9). In that drawing in particular, the rapid, free strokes of the chalk and its strikingly dark and somewhat greasy consistency are very similar indeed to what we see in the Young Lion Resting. There are also parallels in these respects with some of Rembrandt’s extremely dynamic black chalk landscape drawings, which are generally dated to the 1640s, notably the sheets in Aachen, Vienna and Berlin.²⁹

Lions in seventeenth-century Amsterdam?
An important question to ask at this point is whether any information survives that would help clarify exactly where and when Rembrandt might actually have seen the lion whose portrait he has drawn here, which was most likely a Barbary lion, from North Africa. It is easy for a modern observer to assume that exotic animals such as this would have been readily available to an interested artist like Rembrandt, but this was by no means the case in seventeenth-century Holland. As Michiel Roscam Abbings so evocatively described in his book about the elephant that was drawn by Rembrandt in 1637, she was in fact one of only two elephants that were seen in the Netherlands in the entire seventeenth century.³⁰

As one of the world’s greatest marit.mes and trading powers, the Dutch had close links during this period with many far-flung locations, ranging from New Amsterdam (now New York), through Central America and Brazil, West and South Africa, Southern India and Sri Lanka, and all the way to Indonesia and what is now Taiwan. From all these places, exotic objects, minerals, plants and animals were brought back to Holland, both for commercial reasons and to further scientific knowledge, but even so, it should be recognised that it was extremely difficult to bring a large wild animal safely across vast distances, and the most exotic ones were seen only rarely.

Some of the animals that were brought to the Netherlands were toured around the regular fairs and festivals that were held throughout the country, kept in tents or mobile cages, to be viewed by paying cust.mes rs. Others entered the fixed menageries that were formed by aristocrats at their country estates, although the main examples of these menageries, including that of Prince William V at the palace of Het Loo, were not established until rather later in the seventeenth century or early in the eighteenth. More frequently, those animals that were not being taken from place to place were made available for viewing at small, commercial menageries housed in the courtyards of inns, such as the one at Blauw Jan’s, on the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam, which was the city’s most important venue of this kind, or the smaller ‘Witte Oliphant’ (‘White Elephant’), on the Botermarkt. Each t.mes the owners of these establishments acquired a new and interesting animal, they would publish a broadsheet advertisement, encouraging members of the public to come and view the new attraction.³¹

Lions seem to have been shown in Amsterdam more regularly than elephants, though even they were probably only to be seen once every few years. According to Laurien van der Werff of the Rijksmuseum, who has kindly shared with us her ongoing research on this subject, the two most important sources of information on the presence of lions in the Dutch Republic are the 46 volumes of manuscript diary notes of the German-born scholar, librarian and mayor of Harderwijk, Ernst Brinck (1582-1649), and the archives of the Amsterdam Spinhouse, the charitable organisation that would get part of the revenue from the fairs held in the city, where exotic animals were frequently exhibited.³²

Brinck was clearly extremely interested in exotic animals, noting down more or less every one that he saw on his travels, though unfortunately he did not always provide exact dates. We do, though, know from his notes that in 1644 and again in 1645 a young lion was to be seen in Amsterdam, and that unspecified lions were to be seen in Harderwijk, Delft and Amsterdam in 1646 and 1647, and Roscam Abbings tells us that both a lion and a lioness were shown at the fair in The Hague in 1648.³³ In 1649, Brinck notes that an old lion was shown in Amsterdam, perhaps the one depicted in Rembrandt’s drawing in the Louvre.

While no documentary record has so far been identified that allows us to say with any certainty exactly when Rembrandt made his astonishing drawing of a Young Lion Resting, it is clear from these sources that lions were to be seen in Amsterdam at various t.mes s in the mid-1640s, and very possibly also before then, and that a young lion was shown in both 1644 and 1645. What is more, the annual fairs at which these animals could have been seen were staged on what is now the Waterlooplein, just a two-minute walk from the house in the Jodenbreestraat that was purchased by Rembrandt in 1639, and is now home to the Rembrandthuis Museum.

The symbolism of the lion in the art and culture of so many civilisations through the course of history cannot be overstated, and images of this magnificent, rarely seen animal were at least as resonant in seventeenth-century Holland as anywhere else; indeed, from the late sixteenth century on, cartographers even routinely depicted The Netherlands within the form of a lion, under the title ‘Leo Belgicus’ (fig. 10). It is therefore not surprising that if Rembrandt was presented with an opportunity to study this most impressive and noble of beasts, he would have been sure to make the most of it. In fact, as we have seen, he only rarely included images of lions in his works, but they do feature in a number of important biblical subjects, so Rembrandt would surely have wanted to be able to include the most convincing images he could of them in any appropriate context, and would have studied them as thoroughly as possible if the opportunity arose.

This desire to observe, describe and capture the essence of the world around him is only rivalled in Rembrandt’s creative process by his unparalleled ability to see to the psychological and spiritual core of any human subject that he depicted. Whether in his portraits or in his biblical or historical subjects, the observer is always struck, if not overwhelmed, by Rembrandt’s ability to see to the very heart of his subject, and to the soul of his portrait sitters. In this drawing, we see exactly the same psychological penetration in action, only here the ‘sitter’ for the portrait happens to be a lion rather than a human; but still, as is Rembrandt’s genius, we see far beyond the physical features of his subject, and deep into its soul.

We are grateful to Drs. Laurien van der Werff and Michiel Roscam Abbings for kindly sharing with us their research on the presence of lions in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century.

Please also note that the drawing has been requested for the exhibition, Rembrandt’s Lions: Art and Exile in the Dutch Republic, curated by Sarah Mallory, to be held at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, from 23 October 2026 until 31 January 2027.

^1.According to the records of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague.
^2.According to the records of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague. Their photograph of the drawing believed to have been donated by Robert Lebel in 1968.
^3.W.L. Strauss, and M. van der Meulen, The Rembrandt Documents, New York 1979, 1656/12, no. 249
^4.Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, inv. Z 719; M. Royalton-Kisch, The Drawings of Rembrandt. A Revision of Otto Benesch’s Catalogue Raisonné, online, (https://rembrandtcatalogue.net/), under ‘Drawings Not in Benesch’, posted 23 October 2016; P. Schatborn and E. Hinterding, Rembrandt: The Complete Drawings and Etchings, Cologne 2019, no. D466a
^5.London, British Museum, inv. Ff,4.121; Royalton-Kisch, op. cit., under ‘Drawings Not in Benesch’, posted March 2013; Schatborn and Hinterding, op. cit., no. D459
^6.Vienna, Albertina, inv. 17558 and 8900; London, British Museum, inv. Gg,2.259; O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt, ed. Eva Benesch, 6 vols. (London, 1973), vol. 3, nos. 457-459; Schatborn and Hinterding, op. cit., nos. 464-466
^7.Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 4698; London, British Museum, inv. Pp,2.117 and Pp,2.116; respectively, Benesch, op. cit., vol. 4, nos. 777-779; Schatborn and Hinterding, op. cit., nos. D467, D469, D470
^8.Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 4687; Benesch, op. cit., vol. 3, no. 456; Schatborn and Hinterding, op. cit., nos. D468
^9.London, British Museum, inv. Oo,9.71 and Oo, 9.75; Benesch, op. cit., vol. 4, nos. 774-775; Schatborn and Hinterding, op. cit., nos. D473, D474
^10.P. Schatborn, ‘Van Rembrandt tot Crozat: Vroege verzamelingen met tekeningen van Rembrandt,’ Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 32, 1981, pp. 21–24
^11.Benesch, op. cit., vol. 4, nos. 776, 781, 782, 979
^12.Daniel in the Lions’ Den, 1649–52, black chalk, pen, and brown ink, brush and brown wash, heightened with white, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, inv. MB 200. W. Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, 10 vols., New York 1979–92, vol. 9, no. 2145
^13.Bernard Picart, Recueil de Lions, Amsterdam 1729, nos. F 5 and F 6
^14.Sale, Amsterdam, 3 May 1800, kunstboek VV, nos. 32–45. The four drawings from this group that have been accepted as the work of Rembrandt do not correspond to the drawings used by Picart. See Schatborn, op. cit., 1981, p. 28
^15.The two British Museum drawings were both donated to the museum in 1824 by Richard Payne Knight; it is not known where he obtained them. The Louvre drawing was also in England, in the collects ions of Henry Reveley (1737-1798) and Robert Prioleau Roupell (1798-1886), before being acquired by Léon Bonnat, from whom it passed to the Louvre in 1919. The Rijksmuseum drawing was possibly in the collects ion of Willem van Loon (1707-1783), and remained in Dutch collects ions until acquired by the museum in 1901. The Rotterdam drawing passed through a number of illustrious collects ions in France and England (D. Vivant-Denon, T. Lawrence, J. Knowles, W. Esdaile, P. Mathey and E. Wauters), before being acquired by Franz Koenigs, with whose collects ion it came to the Boijmans.
^16.S. Twiehaus, ‘”Rembrandt, der doch unter allen hierin der Solitär ist, und bleibt” – Jean-Jacques de Boissieu und Adolph Menzel als Radierer’, in Zwischen den Welten. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte für Jürg Meyer zur Capellen, Weimar 2001, pp. 242-253
^17.Sale, Paris, Replica Shoes ’s, 25 March 2009. The sale did not include the Rembrandt drawing, which probably left Lebel’s collects ion before his death. He appears to have given a photograph of it to the RKD in 1968.
^18.In 1991, Martin Royalton-Kisch wrote that the British Museum lion facing to the right is drawn in charcoal, rather than black chalk (M. Royalton-Kisch, Drawings by Rembrandt and His Circle in the British Museum, exhib. cat., London, British Museum, 1991, under no. 34), and has since maintained this view regarding both drawings, but Jeroen Giltaij disagreed in his review of Royalton-Kisch 1991 (J. Giltaij, in Simiolus, 23, 1995, p. 98). Marjorie Shelley, having examined the Leiden collects ion drawing in the conservation department at the Metropolitan Museum, also believes the medium used in that drawing is chalk, not charcoal. Examination of the three drawings all together at the British Museum on 22 December 2025 appeared to confirm that the materials used in all three are the same, but it remains unclear whether the black lines are drawn in chalk, charcoal or a combination of the two.
^19.Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 4721; Benesch, op. cit., vol. 5, no. 1214; Schatborn and Hinterding, op. cit., no. D477
^20.Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, inv. R12 (PK); Benesch, op. cit., vol. 5, no. 1211; Schatborn and Hinterding, op. cit., no. D476
^21.Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. RP-T-1901-A-4524; Benesch, op. cit., vol. 5, no. 1216; Schatborn and Hinterding, op. cit., no. D478
^22.Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, inv. 1717 (OK); J. Bruyn, et al., A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. 3, 1635-1642, The Hague 1989, no. A 135
^23.The dating of the painting has been much discussed. Dendrochronological examination has shown that it is executed on a panel from the same tree as the support of a painting in Washington D.C., Portrait of a Polish Nobleman, dated 1637, but it is itself dated 164_ (the last number is indistinct), indicating that it was actually completed at some point in the 1640s.
^24.B 100; The New Hollstein. Rembrandt, no. 126; Schatborn and Hinterding, op. cit., no. E77
^25.The Small Lion Hunt: with Two Lions, and The Small Lion Hunt: With One Lion, c. 1629; respectively, B 115, B 116; The New Hollstein. Rembrandt, nos. 28, 29; Schatborn and Hinterding, op. cit., nos. E110, E111.
^26.B 114; The New Hollstein. Rembrandt, no. 187; Schatborn and Hinterding, op. cit., no. E147
^27.B 104; The New Hollstein. Rembrandt, no. 275; Schatborn and Hinterding, op. cit., no. E80
^28.London, British Museum, inv. 1848,0911.138; Benesch, op. cit., vol. 4, nos. 758; Schatborn and Hinterding, op. cit., no. D639
^29.Aachen, Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, inv BK 483 and BK 482; Vienna, Albertina inv.17572; Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv KdZ 1108; respectively, Benesch, op. cit., vol. 4, nos. 968, 969, 806, 818; Schatborn and Hinterding, op. cit., nos. D499, D500, D504, D505. It should also be noted that in the case of another similar landscape drawing in Rotterdam, it has been suggested that the artist used charcoal rather than black chalk (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, inv. R26 (PK); Benesch, op. cit., vol. 4, no. 813)
^30.M. Roscam Abbings , Rembrandt’s Elephant. Following in Hansken’s Footsteps, Amstelveen 2021
^31.See F.F.J.M. Pieters, ‘The menagerie of "The White Elephant" in Amsterdam: with some notes on other 17th and 18th century menageries in The Netherlands’, in Die Kulturgeschichte des Zoos, 2001, pp. 47-66
^32.See J.P. Vander Motten and M. Roscam Abbings , ‘Seventeenth-Century English Rope Dancers in the Low Countries’, in Theatre Notebook, vol. 74, no. 1, 2020, pp. 8-31
^33.Roscam Abbings , op. cit., 2021, p. 72