Cheetah in Western culture

Even if the natural conditions of Europe don’t seem propitious for the cheetah hunting, the animal is not alien to the western imagination. For its beauty and rarity, it used to be kept since Roman times. Later on, it became an artistic motif associated to the image of dissolute, but sophisticated culture of Antiquity. It often appeared in 19th century painting as a symbol with multiple meanings, bringing together such connotations as barbarism, cruelty and the outmost refinement.
The Belgian symbolist painter, Ferdinand Khnopff, used the cheetah to transform the animal in an ambiguous figure personifying the Art itself. The mythical Sphinx (the Greek one, associated to the riddle Oedipus was wise enough to answer), incorporating a cheetah body, became a symbol of the questioning and exploring role of the art as something placed at the frontier of the human.


Ferdinand Khnopff, Art (The Caresses of the Sphinx), oil on canvas, 1896, Brussels, Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts.