A French family had a painting of seven lions hanging in its living room since the 1800s; an auctioneer identified it as a Delacroix original that sold for €455,000

Have you ever walked past something in your home for years without realizing its true worth? This is what happened to a family in central France. According to a 2025 Smithsonian Magazine publication, an auctioneer named Malo de Lussac was conducting an inventory of an estate in the Touraine region when he recognized the significance of an oil-on-canvas painting depicting reclining lions. The piece already carried decades-old documentation suggesting it was authentic, but the family, who had owned it since the mid-1800s, had never been certain it was a genuine work by one of France’s great 19th-century Romantic artists, Eugène Delacroix.

A living-room regular with a famous name

The artwork, titled “Study of Reclining Lions,” measures 24 inches by 20 inches and depicts seven lions in an array of warm oranges and dark browns; six are rendered in detail, while one is merely sketched, per Smithsonian Magazine. The painting had in fact already been authenticated years earlier: it came with a certificate of authenticity from collector Pierre Dieterle dating back to 1973, as well as a letter from Delacroix expert Lee Johnson dating back to 1966. The back of the canvas also bears a wax seal from the sale of Delacroix’s studio. De Lussac’s contribution, then, wasn’t authenticating the piece from scratch; it was recognizing what that existing documentation meant, at a moment when the family itself wasn’t sure.

If you’re wondering why a Romantic artist would be sketching large cats, it was really just research. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that Delacroix started researching animals at the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris with his friend, sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, in 1828. When a lion died at the facility in 1829, Delacroix sent Barye a rushed note saying “The lion is dead.” The Met, which may be familiar to American readers, hosted a major Delacroix exhibition from September 2018 to January 2019.

The numbers behind the plot twist

The financial swing between estimate and final price was striking. The Daguerre auction house’s lot listing had estimated the piece’s worth at between €200,000 and €300,000, but the painting sold for €455,000, including fees: more than 50% above the top of that estimate, when it went to auction in late March 2025. The magazine’s end-of-year highlights reported that the piece smashed its presale estimate of up to $330,000 to sell for nearly $500,000.

The euro figure is the more precise reference point, since dollar conversions vary slightly depending on the exchange rate applied. De Lussac is no stranger to headline-making discoveries: in 2023, he appraised a piece that turned out to be a genuine work by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, which sold for around $850,000, the magazine reported.

What this story does (and doesn’t) tell us

This story is a reminder that significant art can go unrecognized by its own owners for generations, but it isn’t evidence of a broader trend. This painting’s significance came to light only because an experienced auctioneer connected existing expert documentation, a 1966 letter, a 1973 certificate, and a studio wax seal, to a work the family had hung on their wall without ever being certain what it was. Pieces like this aren’t identified by chance alone; they require expertise, paper trails, and physical evidence like the seal on this canvas. The takeaway, then, is less “check your attic” than “check what documentation exists for pieces passed down through your family;” after all, this Delacroix spent 150 years in plain view in a living room, not hidden away in storage.