Daniel in the Lions' Den — Briton Rivière
Daniel in the Lions' Den — Briton Rivière
Look at the lions. Not one of them is looking at him.
The story
Rivière painted animals for a living and he was better at it than almost anyone in Victorian England — he went to the zoo the way other painters went to the life room. That expertise is the reason this picture works.
He could have painted lions cowering, or snarling, or miraculously tamed. Instead he painted them bored. They pace, they lie down, they look at the wall. The miracle is not that they have been subdued. It is that they have simply lost interest.
Daniel stands with his back to us and his hands behind him, facing away from the only light in the room. You never see his face. There are bones on the floor.
Its formal title is Daniel's Answer to the King, and it hangs in Manchester. Almost nobody calls it that.
What arrives
- Printed on canvas and set in a wooden frame — not a poster, not paper behind glass.
- Made to order after you buy it, then shipped worldwide.
- Briton Rivière, 1890. Public domain — free to reproduce, which is the only reason a canvas like this can cost what it does.
- Upscaled from the museum scan before printing — sharpened, with no detail invented or added.
Good to know
Screens are backlit and canvas is not. Colours read deeper and softer on the wall than they do here. Sizes are the framed dimensions. This painting is wider than it is tall, and the sizes below match its proportions almost exactly.
Buy any two prints, the third is half price. Applied automatically at checkout — no code needed.
Finish the wall
Four pictures worth owning for what happened in them. Each is sized to its own proportions, so pick the scale that suits your wall.
