Artwork · 15th century · Leonardo da Vinci

LeoTurn on Magnifier at the lower right and move slowly across the painting.
Full screen opens it edge to edge.Tap the painting to fill the screen.
Spread two fingers to look closer.

A Bear Walking

Leonardo da Vincica. 1482–85silverpoint on light buff prepared paper10.3 × 13.3 cm

Make a frame or mug with this painting →

At a glance

Text size

A bear steps to the left with one front paw lifted, drawn in silverpoint on a small sheet of tinted paper.
Leonardo da Vinci made it around 1482 to 1485, when he was about thirty.
The sheet is only about 13 centimeters wide, yet thin gray lines carry the fur, every claw, and the weight of each step.

Reading the picture

5 places to look closer

Tap a number on the painting to jump to its note, or a close-up to see that spot in the whole picture.

Start with the face. A single confident line runs from the rounded tip of the nose up over the brow. The small round eye and the darker line of the mouth make the bear look as if it is following a scent. Around the ears and neck, short overlapping strokes build up a thick, shaggy coat.
Zoom in on the two front legs in the middle. The left paw has just come off the ground, wrist bent, toes curling. The right paw is planted, toes spread, with curved claws drawn crisply. One foot up and one foot down is all it takes. The drawing is still, but the walk keeps going.
Look at the lines on the shoulder and body. The shoulder is covered in short curved strokes, stacked like scales. Across the body, fine parallel lines slope from upper left to lower right. That direction of hatching shows up again and again in drawings by Leonardo, who was left-handed.
Drop down to the lower left. Away from the bear's body, a single paw is drawn again, larger. Layers of lines work over the thick pads and hooked claws. It looks as if, after drawing the whole animal, Leonardo still wanted a closer look at the foot.
Now look just below and to the left of the bear's head, at what seems to be blank paper. There is a very faint oval and marks that look like a face. The sheet is described as carrying the faint outline of a seated woman under the bear. Leonardo reused a sheet he had already drawn on.

When it was painted

Around 1482, Leonardo was about thirty, and he left Florence for Milan. He was hoping to find work at the court of Ludovico Sforza, the city's ruler. A draft of the letter he wrote to Ludovico still survives. It spends most of its length on bridges, weapons, and siege machines, and only near the end mentions that he could also paint and sculpt.

Big commissions soon followed. In 1483 he signed a contract with a Milanese confraternity to paint an altarpiece, the picture now known as the Virgin of the Rocks. This bear belongs to those same years, when he was settling into his new city.

The Metropolitan Museum places this sheet in a group of bear studies that Leonardo probably made for an anatomical treatise he was planning. A few years later, around 1488 to 1490, he dissected a bear's hind foot and drew its tendons and the places where they attach to the bones. Those drawings are now in the Royal Collection in Britain.

Another small silverpoint drawing, a bear's head, has survived separately. In July 2021 it sold at Christie's in London for about 8.9 million pounds, the highest price paid at auction for a Leonardo drawing up to that time.

A Bear Walking was part of the collection of the New York banker Robert Lehman and came to the Metropolitan Museum with his collection in 1975. Look once more at the planted paw and its claws. Years before he cut a bear's foot open, Leonardo was already mapping its shape, one careful line at a time, on this little sheet.

The painter

Leonardo da Vinci

1452–1519

All paintings by Leonardo da Vinci →

More by the same painter

The Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing Right1510–13

Hidden stories in this painting

Why did Leonardo draw this bear's paw a second time?A bear ambles across a sheet of paper no bigger than your palm. Beside it, one huge paw has been drawn all on its own.

Questions to think about

Look for itOn the bear's body, how do the lines for fur look different from the lines for shadow?
Why?Why do you think Leonardo drew the whole bear and then drew one paw again, bigger, off to the side?
What about you?Leonardo went as far as dissecting animals to understand them. Where do you think people who study animals today should draw the line?

Same period