This picaresque lion was drawn by Salvador Dalí for Stephan Lion, a curator, collector and exhibition designer. Lion worked with Dalí as his business associate in New York in the 1940s and ‘50s, securing work for him on several occasions including a series of illustrations for Life magazine and, less conventionally, a commission to brand a new tranquiliser called ‘Miltown’ in 1958. In 1956, Lion commissioned Dalí to make a drawing that was based on his surname. Pertaining to Stephan Lion’s family name as it does, this lion belongs to the iconography of genealogy, the study of lineage, which encompasses the medieval tradition of heraldry – a vein of imagery which is rich in lions, both ‘rampant’ (rearing up) and, as in Dalí’s drawing, ‘couchant’ (lying down). Dalí made two drawings for Lion, the other of which is now in the Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida (fig. 1). Le Lion was a preparatory work for the Dalí Museum drawing, which was executed in finer detail along with the cursory addition of a perspectival landscape. Where the Dalí Museum drawing shows the lion standing up on all four legs, its head turned to the viewer and its jaw opened wide, this work depicts the lion in the ‘couchant’ attitude, the jaw closed and its gaze averted into the middle distance. As a preparatory work, this drawing was never delivered to Lion and was instead acquired from Dalí by Ralph Aquino – another collector of the artist’s work who was also based in New York.