Tiger hunting

Tiger Hunting, painted in 1920 and among Rivière's latest known works, continues a subject he had explored across his career — the confrontation of colonial hunters with large feline predators in Indian or Asian settings. Tiger hunting was both a real practice of British colonial administration and a widely consumed cultural fantasy, illustrated in memoirs, periodicals, and popular painting throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Rivière, who studied tigers extensively at the London Zoo, constructed credible confrontation scenes without direct experience of India, relying on natural history illustration, photographs, and written accounts. The 1920 date makes this a post-war work, when the imperial confidence underlying such subjects was beginning to fracture.

Rivière's tiger anatomy is as accomplished as his lion work, drawing on direct study of zoo specimens to achieve the specific musculature, stripe pattern, and eye of the Bengal tiger. The Indian jungle setting required a different atmospheric treatment from his temperate English scenes — denser foliage, stronger light-and-shadow contrast, and a more oppressive sense of enclosure.