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A Sleeping Leopard
George Stubbs (British, 1724–1806)
1791
- Medium
- Soft-ground etching with roulette work
- Classification
- Dimensions
- Image and Plate: 18 x 23.7 cm (7 1/16 x 9 5/16 in.); Sheet: 18.4 x 24 cm (7 1/4 x 9 7/16 in.)
- Culture
- England, 18th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Prints
- Credit line
- Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
A famed animal painter, George Stubbs studied anatomy and likely had access to one of London’s various menageries, where he could view animals kept as curiosities and brought to England from across the globe. Here, Stubbs used innovative printmaking techniques to capture the roughness of the tree bark, the rocky surface of the ground, and the softness of the leopard’s fur. Stubbs was one of the earliest artists to experiment with soft-ground etching, which allowed him to re-create texture by transferring his image onto a printing plate through an actual drawing.
