Una and the Lion

Una and the Lion, undated, takes its subject from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, in which the virtuous Una — representing truth — is protected by a lion after her champion abandons her. The lion, tamed by Una's innocence and beauty, follows and defends her through the allegory's dangerous landscape. The subject was popular with Victorian painters working in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, and for Rivière — whose mastery of lion painting was unequalled in the period — it offered a perfect synthesis of his literary and animal interests. The lion's submissive devotion to a pure female figure allowed him to demonstrate both anatomical accuracy and psychological nuance in a single subject.

The compositional challenge of Una and the Lion is balancing the scale and physical authority of the lion against the human scale and moral authority of Una. Rivière's lion would display his characteristic anatomical command, while the figure of Una would be posed to suggest the paradox of fragility exercising power over the wild.