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Paul Friedrich Meyerheim • between 1885 and 1890
The Jealous Lioness is a medium-sized cabinet painting — intimate in scale relative to the grandeur of its subject — that stages one of the most theatrically compressed and psychologically rich scenes in nineteenth-century German animal painting. Three protagonists are organized within the tight rectangle of the canvas: a female lion tamer, a caged male lion, and a captive lioness. The triangular dynamic between them — desire, possession, and fury — gives the painting its wit, its visual energy, and its surprisingly complex engagement with questions of gender, dominance, jealousy, and the contested boundary between the civilized and the wild. The weapons of a woman: the female lion tamer lays claim to the lion with calm confidence while the jealous lioness snarls at her threateningly. As the two rivals violate the boundaries of their respective territories — the woman's hand reaches into the cage, the lioness's paws grope out between its bars — the object of desire merely watches. With a subtle sense of humour, the painter Paul Meyerheim — a friend of Adolph Menzel — staged not only the reversal of gender roles in the domination of the male by the female, but also the superiority of reason over "wild nature."
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