Eugène Delacroix

The significance of traveling through North Africa to Delacroix's career has been well-remarked. In 1832, he first ventured as part of a diplomatic delegation dispatched by the French king Louis-Philippe, and led by the cultivated Count Charles de Mornay, to Moulay Abd al-Rahman in French-occupied Algeria. This trip led him briefly through Spain, and throughout Morocco and Algeria for nearly five months.
This sheet comprises a principal study drawn in graphite and tinted with wash depicting a Moroccan man in a white burnoose with an ochre cloak, with ancillary graphite studies of the folds of his turban, his standing figure, and his upturned face. Delacroix's reaction to the bearing and clothing of the chieftains was to equate them with figures from the more familiar European context of Greco-Roman antiquity. In an often quoted letter to his friend Jean-Baptiste Pierret, the artist remarked: "All of them in white, like Roman senators or Greeks at the Panathenean festival" (Delacroix 2001, 187-88). He also recounted his high-handed strategy to compel anyone reluctant to comply with his request that they pose for him (a challenge faced by most French artists in North Africa): "I am gradually insinuating myself into the customs of the country, so as to be able to draw many of these Moorish figures quite freely. They have very strong prejudices against the noble art of painting, but a few coins slipped here and there settle their scruples" (Delacroix to Pierret and Félix Guillemardet, 8 February 1832, Delacroix 2001, 182-84). Unlike some of Delacroix's more casual notations, this study is a more formal and purposeful rendering of a particular sitter, perhaps the same one depicted in profile on another sheet (see Paris 1994-95, no. 22, repr., private collection). While Delacroix was studying the man as a character type, he also produced an enigmatic portrait of a particular individual who remains unknown to us.