Cupids pestering an old lion

Valdemar Irminger spent nearly nine decades making art, and this playful scene of cupids tormenting an old lion captures something central to his sensibility: a fondness for animal subjects mixed with a light, almost theatrical sense of humor. Irminger trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and spent formative years in Italy on scholarship from 1884 to 1887, where he absorbed classical and Renaissance traditions that would have introduced him to the long history of putti, those chubby winged infant figures borrowed from antiquity and beloved by Baroque and Romantic painters alike. By the 1890s, he had shifted from Realism toward Romanticism, and a subject like this fits comfortably within that transition.

The painting belongs to a genre with deep roots, pitting the vulnerability of age and power against the mischief of youth. The lion, traditionally a symbol of strength and nobility, is here reduced to a figure of weary dignity, besieged by creatures who seem to operate entirely without consequences. Irminger was known for painting children with real sensitivity, and it is hard not to see the cupids here as extensions of that interest, youth as an irrepressible, slightly anarchic force. Though the exact date of this work is unknown, his long exhibiting career at Charlottenborg and his reputation for animal subjects suggest it could belong to almost any phase of his mature output.