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The Jealous Lioness (c. 1885–1890, oil on canvas, 49.6 × 69.0 cm, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, SM 1375) is a cabinet painting by the Berlin animal painter Paul Friedrich Meyerheim, acquired by the Städelscher Museums-Verein in 1903. The painting stages a triangular confrontation in a circus menagerie setting between a female lion tamer (the Dompteuse), who calmly claims the attention of a caged male lion, and a female lioness, who snarls with possessive fury from behind or against the cage bars at this rival for the male's attention. The male lion himself — passive and impassive — watches, indifferent. With the dry wit characteristic of Meyerheim's friendship with Adolph Menzel, the painting deploys this scenario to explore simultaneously: the reversal of conventional gender roles (the female as confident dominator, the male as passive object of desire); the comic anthropomorphism of animal emotion (jealousy as a cross-species phenomenon); and the superiority of rational self-possession over unmastered emotion, staged as a contest between human calm and animal fury across the bars of a cage. Technically distinguished by Meyerheim's decades of direct observation of big cats at the Berlin Zoo and informed by his engagement with Delacroix, the Barbizon tradition, and the Berlin Realism of Menzel, the painting is his finest single canvas and one of the most psychologically rich small-format animal paintings of the German nineteenth century.
