Delacroix’s Moroccans

Delacroix’s Moroccans

Art and Masculinity

Jennifer W. Olmsted

The Pennsylvania State University Press

University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Olmsted, Jennifer, author.

Title: Delacroix’s Moroccans : art and masculinity / Jennifer W. Olmsted.

Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2025] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary: “Examines the intersection of gender, race, and imperialism in Eugène Delacroix’s representations of Arab men from his famous trip to Morocco in 1832 as models of heroic masculinity and dignified autonomy”—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024044752 | ISBN 9780271098968 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Delacroix, Eugène, 1798–1863—Themes, motives. | Delacroix, Eugène, 1798–1863—Criticism and interpretation. | Masculinity in art. | Men in art. | Moroccans in art. | Morocco—In art.

Classification: LCC ND553.D33 O46 2025 | DDC 759.4—dc23/eng/20241011

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024044752

Copyright © 2025 Jennifer W. Olmsted

All rights reserved

Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,

University Park, PA 16802–1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses.

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Additional images: frontispiece, Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Chieftain Receiving Tribute, 1837; page iv, Eugène Delacroix, Collision of Arab Horsemen, 1833–34.

For my parents

Illustrations

1.Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Military Exercises, 1833

2.Eugène Delacroix, Sketches from Tangier, 1832

3.Eugène Delacroix, The Massacres of Chios, 1824

4.Eugène Delacroix, The Massacres of Chios, detail, 1824

5.Antoine-Jean Gros, Murat Defeating the Turkish Army at Aboukir (sketch for The Battle of Aboukir), 1806

6.Antoine-Jean Gros, Murat Defeating the Turkish Army at Aboukir (sketch for The Battle of Aboukir), detail, 1806

7.Théodore Géricault, Charging Chasseur of the Imperial Guard, 1812

8.Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, Revolt of Cairo, 1810

9.Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827–28

10.Horace Vernet, Massacre of the Mamluks in the Citadel of Cairo Ordered by Mohammed Ali Pasha of Egypt (1811), 1819

11.Eugène Delacroix, Turk Seated on a Sofa Smoking, 1825

12.Eugène Delacroix, Young Turk Stroking His Horse, ca. 1826

13.Eugène Delacroix, Turk Saddling His Horse, 1824

14.Carle Vernet, Mamluk and His Horse, ca. 1819

15.Eugène Delacroix, Figure of Horse, Rear Leg (Profile), ca. 1820

16.Eugène Delacroix, Studies of Horses, ca. 1818–26

17.Eugène Delacroix, Seated Figure in Turkish Costume, 1824–25

18.Eugène Delacroix, Holster, Powder Horn, and Two Small Pouches, from the “Bremen Sketchbook,” ca. 1823

19.Pierre-Henri Révoil, Convalescence of Chevalier Bayard, ca. 1817

20.Eugène Delacroix, Study of Arabs, January 30, 1832

21.Jacques-Nicolas Paillot de Montabert, Roustam Raza, Mamluk of Emperor Napoleon I, 1806

22.Eugène Delacroix, Letter to Jean-Baptiste Pierret from Tangier, February 29, 1832

23.Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Man Wearing a Haik, 1832

24.Eugène Delacroix, Count Charles de Mornay in Ambassadorial Dress, ca. 1832

25.Eugène Delacroix, Standing Moroccan from Tangier, March 2, 1832

26.Roman, statue of Augustus, 1st century ce

27.Eugène Delacroix, Four Sketches of Arab Men, April 3, 1832

28.Eugène Delacroix, Street in Meknes, 1834

29.Eugène Delacroix, Convulsionists of Tangier, 1838

30.Jacques-Louis David, The Anger of Achilles, 1819

31.Eugène Delacroix, Young Arab Man in His Apartment, 1832

32.Phidias, figure of Dionysus from the east pediment of the Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens, ca. 438–32 bce

33.Eugène Delacroix, Study of Dionysus, ca. 1824–25

34.Jean-Pierre-Marie Jazet, after Horace Vernet, Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, 1835

35.Horace Vernet, The Arab Tale-Teller, 1833

36.Eugène Delacroix, Sketches from the Trip from Meknes to Tangier, April 11, 1832

37.Eugène Delacroix, Collision of Arab Horsemen, 1833–34

38.Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Military Exercises, 1832

39.Horace Vernet, The Siege of Constantine: Capture of the City, October 13, 1837, 1839

40.Eugène Delacroix, The Arrival in Meknes, March 15, 1832

41.Eugène Delacroix, Course de Poudre Outside Meknes, 1832

42.Eugène Delacroix, Studies of the Moroccan Cavalry, April 11, 1832

43.Eugène Delacroix, Studies of Arabs on Horseback, March 11, 1832

44.Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Saddle, 1832

45.Eugène Delacroix, Arab by a Grave, 1838

46.Eugène Delacroix, Mohammed ben Abou ben Abd el-Malek, ca. 1832–33

47.Eugène Delacroix, Seven Sketches of Arabs, March 8, 1832

48.Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Chieftain Receiving Tribute, 1837

49.Eugène Delacroix, Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, April 12, 1204, 1840

50.Alexandre Decamps, The Punishment of the Hooks, 1837

51.Eugène Delacroix, The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, 1845

52.Ary Scheffer, The Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom Receives at the Barrière du Trône the First Regiment of Hussards under the Command of the duc de Chartres, 4 August 1830, 1836

53.Horace Vernet, The Duc d’Orléans Proceeds to the Hôtel de Ville, 31 July 1830, 1832

54.Eugène Delacroix, The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, detail, 1845

55.Joseph Aved, Mehemet Said Pacha, Bey of Roumélie, 1742

56.Eugène Delacroix, study for The Sultan of Morocco, ca. 1833

57.Eugène Delacroix, The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, detail, 1845

58.Sidi Mohammed’s Parasol, Profile View, detail, from L’Illustration, October 5, 1844, 78

59.Regnier, Hotelin, Best, and Leloir, after Eugène Delacroix, L’empereur Muley-Abd-el-Rahman, from L’Illustration, September 21, 1844, 33

60.Jacques Guiaud, View of the Tent of the Son of the Sultan of Morocco at the Tuileries Garden in 1844, 1845

61.Horace Vernet, The Capture of the Smala of Abd el-Kader, May 16, 1843, 1844–45

62.Horace Vernet, The Capture of the Smala of Abd el-Kader, May 16, 1843, center detail, 1844–45

63.Horace Vernet, The Capture of the Smala of Abd el-Kader, May 16, 1843, left detail, 1844–45

64.Horace Vernet, The Capture of the Smala of Abd el-Kader, May 16, 1843, right detail, 1844–45

65.Théodore Chassériau, Portrait of Ali ben Hamed, Khalifa of Constantine, 1845

66.Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Troops Fording a River, 1858

67.Eugène Delacroix, Sketches from the Trip to Meknes, 1832

68.Eugène Delacroix, Sketches from the Trip to Meknes, 1832

69.Eugène Delacroix, Sketches from the Trip to Meknes, 1832

70.Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Horsemen by the River Sebou, ca. 1855

71.Eugène Delacroix, Arab Cavalry Practicing a Charge, 1847

72.Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Saddling His Horse, 1855

73.Eugène Delacroix, Arab Chieftain Signaling to His Companions, 1851

74.Eugène Delacroix, Lion Hunt, 1855

75.Eugène Delacroix, The Riding Lesson, 1854

76.Eugène Delacroix, Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable, 1860

77.Eugène Delacroix, Two Horses Fighting in a Stormy Landscape, ca. 1828

78.Eugène Delacroix, Horses Coming Out of the Sea, 1860

79.Théodore Géricault, Two Dapple Gray Horses Fighting in a Stable, 1818

80.Morocco, postage stamp commemorating the third anniversary of King Hassan’s coronation, March 1964

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the many people and institutions that helped me bring this book to fruition. I would first like to offer heartfelt thanks to Holly Clayson, whose trenchant critiques, committed mentorship, and enthusiasm for all things Orientalist guided this project from its earliest moments. I am grateful to David van Zanten for encouraging me to delve more deeply into Delacroix’s use of classical antiquity to describe the civilization he encountered in Morocco. My interest in Delacroix and cross-cultural interactions was first piqued by the late Mary Sheriff, whose loss I still feel keenly. Michal Ginsburg’s belief in this project was key to my success. Samuel Weber and the Paris Program in Critical Theory offered an intellectual home during my years in Paris. My project was enriched by the attentive reading and incisive critiques of my Paris writing group: Amy Freund, Ellen McBreen, Steve Monteiro, Jennifer Sessions, and John Tain. In the United States and Canada, Joyce Polistena, Mysoon Rizk, and the late Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutinsky gave me the opportunity to explore various ideas from the first three chapters of this project in presentations at colloquia and conference panels they organized. I am grateful to Bridget Alsdorf and Marnin Young for including my essay on Delacroix’s Lion Hunt in their special issue on nineteenth-century art at nonsite; among other benefits, this enabled me to refine the focus of my last chapter by exploring Lion Hunt outside this book rather than within it. My manuscript benefited enormously from the expertise and close readings of Michèle Hannoosh and a second anonymous reader. Portions of the introduction and chapter 4 of this book appeared in print in a different guise as “The Sultan’s Authority: Delacroix, Painting, and Politics at the Salon of 1845,” in Art Bulletin 91 (March 2009); Taylor and Francis has kindly granted permission to republish it.

I have been the lucky recipient of generous assistance from many different institutional quarters. Sincere thanks are due to Valérie Bajou at the Château de Versailles; Regina Freyberger at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main; Stéphane Guégan at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Gloria Groom at the Art Institute of Chicago; Laura Mathis at Christie’s New York; Régis Michel at the Musée du Louvre, Paris; Asher Miller at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; François Pouillon at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris; Jennifer Thompson at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the staffs of the Archives Nationales, Paris; the Bibliothèque de l’Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art, Paris; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (including the sites at Tolbiac, Richelieu, and the Opéra); the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies and the Art Collection at Northwestern University; Regenstein Library, University of Chicago; Ryerson Library, Art Institute of Chicago; and the Service de Documentation at the Musée du Louvre, Paris. I give special thanks to Art Resource, New York; Bonhams Saint Cyr; Bridgeman Images; Galerie de Bayser, Paris; Jill Newhouse Gallery, New York; The Matthiesen Gallery, London; and Nezha Bahrouai at the Service développement de la Philatélie, Barid al-Maghrib, Rabat; for their kind assistance with images.

At Wayne State University, I wish to acknowledge the dedication and professionalism of Ian Chapp, Robin Collins, Ted Duenas, Amy Hays, Avanti Herczeg, Terry Kerby, the late Marie Persha, and Michele Porter. I would like to express particular gratitude to Deborah Horanic and the dedicated staff of Interlibrary Services at Purdy-Kresge Library, who tirelessly sought and obtained the many obscure texts I requested. During his tenure as Dean of the College of Fine, Performing, and Communication Arts (CFPCA), Matthew Seeger kindly gave me a much-needed course release during a critical semester for revisions. Thanks are due, too, to Hasan Elahi, Lauren Kalman, Kelly Young, and the CFPCA Faculty Council for their support. I am grateful to my colleagues Adrian Hatfield, Brian Kritzman, Brian Madigan, and the late Stanley Rosenthal for their friendship and enthusiasm for this book.

During the early stages of this project, research in Paris was made possible by generous funding from the Department of Art History and the French Interdisciplinary Group at Northwestern University. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, whose award of a Kress Institutional Fellowship in the History of European Art enabled me to conduct research and writing in Paris over an extended period of time, and to the American University of Paris for hosting me. The American Philosophical Society provided generous support in the form of a Franklin Research Grant for research into Delacroix’s later work that is integral to this project. Sincere thanks are due, too, to numerous entities within Wayne State University for two sabbatical leaves and generous research funding: the Office of the Vice President for Research, the College of Fine, Performing, and Communication Arts, and the James Pearson Duffy Department of Art, Art History, and Design.

This book would not be what it is today without the unflagging patience and wise counsel of Ellie Goodman; I give her my heartfelt thanks. I am grateful for the dedication and professionalism of the staff at Penn State University Press, including Brian Beer, Maddie Caso, Jennifer Norton, Alex Ramos, and Regina Ann Starace. I thank Annika Fisher for her excellent copy editing. Sue Fish and Paula Jorné offered steadfast enthusiasm for my work that was vital to its completion. I am particularly grateful to colleagues and friends who offered encouragement and suggestions at critical junctures in this book’s journey: Daniella Berman, Sarah Betzer, Ellen McBreen, and Marnin Young.

Over the years, I have had the great fortune to enjoy many friendships in the places where this project unfolded (Chicago, Paris, Detroit, and beyond). Sarah Betzer, Sheila Crane, Michèle Hannoosh, Richard Janko, and Vivian Rehberg extended gracious hospitality in Paris, Michigan, and Virginia. My time in Paris was made more joyful by the warm fellowship of my abovementioned writing group, as well as Mike Bosia, Luisa del Chiaro, Josh Clark, Charly Coleman, Andrew Diamond, Samir Haddad, Markus Hardtmann, the late lamented Erin Williams Hyman, Micah Hyman, Peter Benson Miller, Toby Norris, Caroline Rolland, and Meg Zimbeck. I am grateful, too, for friendships that have spanned time and place with Todd Cronan, Eliza Garrison, David Getsy, Michael Golec, Dabney Hailey, Stephanie Smith, and Pamela Warner Weber. My life during the years that this project was underway has also benefited enormously from the friendship of Christina Gallardo, Shirley Huey, Karrie Posio, Jeff Rebudal, and Laurinda Ross.

Like Delacroix, I am lucky to have a large, loving clan of cousins: Alex Raudenbush, Catherine Raudenbush, Danielle Raudenbush and Jacopo Myerston, Eduardo and Ali Cortes, Jane Raudenbush and Ian Cozine, Jesse and Courteney Raudenbush, Liliana and Robert Maresh, and Mariano and Taylor Raudenbush. I am also grateful for the love and hospitality of my aunts and uncles: Lisa and Eduardo Cortes, Christopher Raudenbush, Stephen Raudenbush and Guanglei Hong, the late Stella Raudenbush, and Carole Olmsted Sipos. My greatest thanks and love go to my brother, Nick Olmsted, and to my parents, William and Wendy Olmsted. Our lively conversations, beautiful hikes, and silly pun contests bring immeasurable joy to my life. My parents also read and commented on this book at various stages of its development. I am deeply grateful for their remarkable generosity, love, and support. I dedicate this book to them.

Introduction Revisiting Delacroix’s Orientalism

With a walking stick and a striped bundle by his side, a barefoot traveler sits to watch a quartet of riders gallop in formation across a verdant mountain landscape (fig. 1). His presence invites us to join him in admiring the spectacle of equine exertion and equestrian dexterity that unfolds in the middle ground, where the four horsemen manage their ardent steeds with ease, each man holding the reins in one hand and brandishing or firing a long rifle in the other. The horses have been staggered slightly to reveal variety in both pose and coat color: chestnut, dapple gray, gold champagne, and bay. Dust blooms beneath the beasts’ upraised hooves, and a cloud of gun-smoke billows in front, obscuring the furthest rider. This energetic picture is one of dozens that Eugène Delacroix painted after his trip to Morocco and Algeria in 1832, and it introduces several of the themes that would captivate him in his paintings with North African subjects: the noble dress, equestrian panache, and military prowess of Moroccan men. In these richly meaningful pictures, I will argue, Delacroix departed from typical French attitudes toward North Africans and instead depicted them as models of a heroic and powerful masculinity suitable for history painting, the most consequential genre of his day.

fig. 1 | Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Military Exercises, 1833. Oil on canvas, 60.5 × 74.5 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Städel Museum / Art Resource, New York.

Among Delacroix’s pictures with North African themes, however, none is more famous than his 1834 painting Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (Paris, Musée du Louvre). This picture has virtually eclipsed the rest of Delacroix’s North African oeuvre in the scholarly literature on his work. Since it was first exhibited at the Salon of 1834, Women of Algiers has acquired an almost mythical status. The picture’s conceit of access into the forbidden eroticized space of the harem, its vivid color harmonies, and its detailed descriptions of ethnographic accessories have commanded particular attention. Critics and scholars across various disciplines have interpreted Women of Algiers as both the ultimate Western fantasy of the harem and the point of departure for modern French Orientalism.¹ The latter ideology, which shall be discussed in greater detail below, can be briefly characterized as a European strategy of deploying science and culture within a broader effort to achieve political and economic domination of the territories known in the nineteenth century as the “Orient”—North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and West Asia. The fascination with Women of Algiers has obscured a crucial fact: most of Delacroix’s paintings with North African themes depict men rather than women. More than two-thirds focus on exclusively male groups or individuals, while an additional 17 percent include men in mixed-gender compositions.²

One product of scholars’ absorption in Women of Algiers is the notion that Delacroix turned his attention to Moroccan men only because he could not gain access to Moroccan women.³ In the event that Delacroix sketched Moroccan men as a form of compensation, how can his devotion to male subjects in his oil paintings be explained? Delacroix certainly had more opportunities to sketch men, but the compensation theory does not account for the possibility that the impressive number of oil paintings he devoted to North African men reveals a profound interest in them for their own sake. If Delacroix were truly more attached to painting Muslim women, there was nothing to prevent him from reworking images that reflected his few encounters with them or even inventing scenarios he never witnessed—something he did freely with other subjects in genre scenes he painted during the 1850s and 1860s.⁴ Indeed, he may well have invented the subject of Women of Algiers.⁵ Rather than serving as a consolation prize, Delacroix’s many paintings of Moroccan men and their varied activities—especially riding horses and providing effective leadership—attest instead to an abiding fascination with these men and the type of masculinity they embodied.

Delacroix’s North African Project

Delacroix’s 1832 sojourn in North Africa was the by-product of a diplomatic mission from King Louis-Philippe to Sultan Abd er-Rahman ben Hicham of Morocco. Louis-Philippe had charged Count Charles de Mornay with negotiating a treaty to settle trade disputes between the two kingdoms and to give France control over the contested city of Tlemcen, which lay on the border between Morocco and Algeria.⁶ The Tlemcen question resulted directly from France’s imperialism in Algeria. Louis-Philippe’s predecessor, Charles X, had launched a punitive expedition to the city of Algiers in 1830. Although Charles X used a minor diplomatic incident as a pretext for the attack, he was motivated primarily by a desire to increase his popularity at home and salvage his tottering regime. The gambit failed: Charles X was overthrown, and Louis-Philippe inherited the Algerian problem. On the Moroccan side of the Tlemcen dispute, Sultan Abd er-Rahman hoped to strengthen the Moroccan presence in western Algeria, thereby undermining Ottoman hegemony in the region and pleasing his subjects, but he also wanted to move forward with ambitious projects for modernization and reform. Louis-Philippe, despite political resistance and personal ambivalence to the invasion, would gradually expand the initial expedition into a full-blown conquest of Algeria. Having no desire to provoke opposition from Sultan Abd er-Rahman, the king sought in 1832 to resolve important issues that threatened to fracture the previously neutral relationship between France and Morocco.

As Louis-Philippe’s emissary, the young, urbane Mornay wished to have a companion to keep him entertained during the long months abroad.⁷ On the recommendation of mutual friends who attested to the artist’s sociability, he asked Delacroix to accompany him. The two men would spend countless hours with each other during their six-month sojourn, especially during the weeks when they were traveling or limited to their quarters: the voyages to and from Tangier on board ship, the trips to and from Meknes in tents and on horseback, the restriction to their rooms in Meknes while they waited for an audience with Sultan Abd er-Rahman, and their two-week quarantine in Toulon at the end of the journey. They were joined at various points in this masculine fellowship by other men, notably the ship’s captain, their interpreters, and even the commander of the Moroccan Royal Cavalry. With the exception of the wives and daughters of the European consuls at Tangier and the wife of their Jewish interpreter Abraham Ben Chimol, their environment for much of the trip was a largely homosocial one.

It is also important to note that though the government allowed Mornay to bring Delacroix along, it was unwilling to fund his travels: Delacroix had to pay his own way on the trip.⁸ This seeming constraint had the great benefit of liberating him from the responsibility of producing any official imagery for the government afterward. As a result, his experience was distinct from that of artists like Horace Vernet or Eugène Isabey, who traveled to Algeria at the expense of the French government to create paintings, prints, and drawings that glorified the 1830 invasion and occupation of Algiers and the coastal city of Oran.⁹ Having neither military clashes nor imperial propaganda to celebrate, Delacroix was free to focus on the themes and subjects that interested him.

During his time abroad, Delacroix produced an extraordinary number of drawings and notes. He filled the pages of seven small albums with sketches, observations, and accounts of his experiences (fig. 2).¹⁰ Along with these annotated sketchbooks, he made several hundred individual drawings in graphite, watercolor, and pen and ink (see figs. 20 and 47). Some of the best-known images come from a group of watercolors he made for Mornay as part of a personal commemorative album (fig. 46). Tradition has it that he executed them during the two-week quarantine in Toulon at the end of their journey in July 1832; in any case, they were certainly done before the end of the trip.¹¹ Once he returned to Paris, Delacroix immediately set about transforming his sketches and ideas for subjects into paintings. By the time he died in 1863, he had painted some ninety-five canvases—or nearly one quarter of all his easel paintings between 1832 and 1863—with subjects that were inspired by his experiences in Morocco and Algeria.¹² Within this group, the vast majority depicted Moroccan, rather than Algerian, subjects. The sheer number of paintings suggests that Delacroix considered North African subject matter to be a crucial aspect of his artistic project, but scholarship on his work has largely struggled to account for his deep and abiding interest in this theme.

fig. 2 | Eugène Delacroix, Sketches from Tangier, 1832. Pen and brown ink and watercolor, each page 16.5 × 10 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Album RF 39050, fol. 16v–17r. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

No analysis of Delacroix’s images of Moroccan men can unfold without discussion of the most influential methodology used to analyze his North African work: what we might call the Saidian interpretive lens. Edward Said’s landmark 1978 study, Orientalism, profoundly altered the way that scholars address questions of representation in colonial and imperial contexts like the one that enabled Delacroix to visit North Africa. Briefly put, Said argues that modern European and American portrayals of the “Orient,” or what Americans might call the “Middle East,” are part of a Western strategy to control the East. Said defines Orientalism as a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”¹³ In his view, scientific and cultural representations of the “Orient” by the “Occident,” or West, from the late eighteenth century to the present, have been—and continue to be—inextricably bound up with this political agenda of domination. Since the publication of Said’s enormously important intervention, literary critics, historians, and cultural theorists have offered many critiques and proposed modifications to his claims.¹⁴ One of the chief criticisms of Said’s arguments has been that he reduces both East and West to monolithic entities whose agents are unable to resist the hegemonic structures imposed upon them, a point to which I shall return.¹⁵

In the history of nineteenth-century French art, Linda Nochlin was the first to adapt Said’s proposals to an art-historical context in her foundational 1983 essay “The Imaginary Orient.” Here, Nochlin exhorts art historians to begin serious scrutiny of the power structures that undergirded nineteenth-century French paintings of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. Inspired by Said’s work, she argues that French Orientalist art is marked by absences, most notably the absences of historical specificity and of signs of French-induced violence in Algeria, and she brings the important, useful lens of feminist critique to her analysis. In regard to Delacroix specifically, Nochlin proposes that The Death of Sardanapalus (1827–28; see fig. 9) and Women of Algiers in Their Apartment represent Western fantasies of sexual and cultural domination, while The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage (1845; see fig. 51) depicts a vanquished enemy. Nochlin’s study, in tandem with Said’s, has strongly influenced subsequent generations of Delacroix scholars. In his noteworthy assessment, for instance, of French depictions of Egypt and Algeria during the early nineteenth century (including Delacroix’s trip to Morocco), Todd Porterfield argues that French imperialism dictated the tenor of artistic treatments of the so-called Orient, regardless of individual perspectives or agendas. In his estimation, “the cultural engine of the imperial machine runs rough-shod over the private ruminations and ambivalently expressed sympathies of cultural producers.”¹⁶ More specifically, Porterfield proposes, “In the Orient Delacroix had found . . . a refuge in the uncontroversial realm of imperial justification.”¹⁷ In contrast to these views, I will examine the ways in which Delacroix’s Moroccan pictures reflect an individual perspective that contradicts rather than supports French imperialism in North Africa.

My analysis of Delacroix’s paintings of Moroccan men reinscribes the artist’s agency and his negotiation of the complex politics of his day into the interpretation of his oeuvre. I draw in part on the work of art historians, literary critics, and cultural theorists who problematize Said’s binary constructions of East versus West and question whether “Western” cultural agents embraced colonialism and imperialism monolithically. One of the notable contributions of this body of scholarship is its demonstration that neither “East” nor “West” existed in anything like a unitary form. On the contrary, both were “multiple, fragmented, and localized,” in the words of Frederick Bohrer, and in some cases, the two intermingled.¹⁸ Understanding a given aspect of any culture, therefore, calls for an investigation of the individual properties of the case in question. John MacKenzie, for example, argues that “the arts of empire and Orientalism require a different approach to their understanding, a clearer periodization, a close relationship to event, mood, fashion and changing intellectual context, an effort to comprehend authorial influence and audience reaction, and above all the multiple readings to which they can be subjected.”¹⁹ Examining the impact of these factors on Delacroix’s images of Moroccan men and his engagement with masculinity is one of the essential aims of my study.

From this perspective, two critical tasks emerge. The first is to disentangle Delacroix’s representations of Moroccans from his images of Turks and ancient Assyrians. As I shall demonstrate, the Turks whom Delacroix depicted in his paintings of the 1820s are distinct from the Moroccans he would portray in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. The second crucial part of my enterprise is to acknowledge and examine fully the specifically Moroccan content of Delacroix’s North African oeuvre. One of the most distinctive aspects of the latter is that it focuses largely on Morocco, whereas only a handful of paintings depict Algerian subjects.²⁰ Much of the art-historical scholarship on French images of North Africa that has been inflected by postcolonial theory centers on French relations with and representations of Algeria. Morocco’s relationship to France, however, differed sharply from that of Algeria. Politically, Morocco and Algeria shared little during the nineteenth century. Morocco had been an autonomous kingdom since the eighth century. Algeria, in contrast, had been a satellite regency of the Ottoman Empire for three hundred years before the French invasion of 1830.²¹ By the end of the 1840s, France’s military conquest of Algeria was close to conclusion, and colonization was well underway. France and Morocco, on the other hand, shared a largely neutral—if occasionally tense—relationship during that same period. This state of affairs was interrupted briefly in the early 1840s, when the French discovered that Sultan Abd er-Rahman was supporting the Algerian resistance movement. After a series of internal blunders on both sides led to a failure of diplomatic resolution, the French military bombarded the cities of Tangier and Mogador in 1844 and attacked the Moroccan cavalry in the plains of the river Isly. The resulting French victory weakened Moroccan hegemony in the region, but it otherwise largely reestablished the status quo of the early 1830s: the sultan agreed to stay out of Algeria, and the French were able to pursue their agenda there with no intervention from Morocco.²²

The events of 1844 constituted the only significant instance of military conflict between France and Morocco during the nineteenth century.²³ Seeing that the French lacked the resources to effectively control, organize, and administer their colony in Algeria, they would have been hard put to stage a similarly imperialist effort in Morocco, and there is no evidence that the government wished to do so.²⁴ After the sultan agreed to close his borders to the Algerian resistance leader Abd el-Kader, the French government returned the land it had seized in the 1844 attacks and refused to make any further incursions into the kingdom, against the wishes of the aggressive French military leadership.²⁵ In Morocco’s case, then, warfare with France was limited to two discrete instances in one month, and the terms of the resulting treaty established a neutral relationship between the two kingdoms, a very different state of affairs from France’s relentless, bloody subjugation of Algeria.

By attending to the specific histories and cultures of the various groups that fall within the scope of this study, we can arrive at a richer and more robust understanding of the imagery in question. The approach I use here shares the objectives of the interdisciplinary field of Mediterranean studies, which envisions the Mediterranean Sea as a vast series of networks of trade, migration, and cross-cultural exchange. Eschewing the universalizing binarism associated with Saidian theoretical models, this mode of inquiry examines individual movements and interactions between distinct groups. Inspired by Fernand Braudel’s 1972 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, this expansive field extends well beyond the period that is the focus of this book. In their cross-cultural emphasis, some of these studies incorporate the work of Mary Louise Pratt, who introduced to a wide audience the concept of “transculturation,” the process by which colonized subjects selectively represent themselves to imperialists.²⁶ Elisabeth Fraser’s investigation of artistic exchanges between France and the Ottoman Empire is an especially noteworthy example.²⁷ Like Fraser, I find that Pratt’s theory offers a useful analytic tool that goes beyond a narrow colonial context to encompass cross-cultural encounters more broadly. My study of Delacroix’s images of Morocco heeds Pratt’s call to attend to the subjects themselves (even if, in this case, they are not colonized subjects) by examining the realities of Moroccan politics and culture as well as the lives of individual Moroccans whom Delacroix met during his travels. As I shall demonstrate, many of Delacroix’s experiences in Morocco were carefully mediated by Sultan Abd er-Rahman and his closest advisors, and these encounters shaped his representations both in 1832 and in years to follow.

The social construct of masculinity is a second critical element of my investigation of the historical and cultural particularities of Delacroix’s representations of Moroccan men. In this study, I use the term “masculinity” in the singular with the understanding that it is a multifaceted construct with different models and possibilities, some of which may coexist and be in competition with one another in any given era. The historical contingencies of manliness in France during the period between the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and the founding of the Third Republic have recently begun to receive much-needed attention across the disciplines.²⁸ With the exception of military manliness, most of the scholarship to date has focused on middle-class and aristocratic notions of masculinity, but nevertheless this work greatly illuminates our understanding of gender in the nineteenth century.

As a group, these studies reveal that expectations of men shifted greatly during the first half of the nineteenth century, beginning with the French Revolution, which put an end to many aspects of masculinity that derived from aristocratic norms.²⁹ The Napoleonic era then gave rise to new demands that matched that period’s meritocratic and militaristic aims more closely. Ideals of manliness changed again during the Restoration and July Monarchy in response to the values of the newly ascendant bourgeoisie. Over the course of the roughly eighty-year period between 1789 and 1870, three sets of values shaped the conduct and ambitions of many Frenchmen. The first, and perhaps most important, was honor. Robert Nye and William Reddy demonstrate that honor played a crucial role in constructions of manliness in both public and private realms throughout the nineteenth century.³⁰ A second vital arena for the public performance of masculinity was provided by militarism, with its cross-class emphasis on bravery, self-sacrifice, and embrace of duty. Although this paradigm held greatest sway during the Napoleonic era, its influence continued to be felt long afterward.³¹ Delacroix explored new models of military and leadership masculinity in his depictions of the men he encountered in Morocco, while other artists, like Vernet, sought to recreate the heroism of the Napoleonic era in the newly formed army of Africa (armée d’Afrique). For both Delacroix and Vernet, persuasive modes of male agency were central not just to contemporary gender roles but to the practice of painting as well. Along with their embrace of honor and the military ideals of courage and self-discipline, the Restoration and July Monarchy witnessed a surge in the importance of a new form of public self-presentation that emphasized sartorial elegance and emotional self-possession. These values were sometimes pushed to controversial extremes by the emergent figure of the dandy, who offered a more extravagant iteration of them, becoming a paradigm in his own right by the Second Empire.³² Each of these aspects of nineteenth-century manliness, I shall argue, informed Delacroix’s representations of Moroccan men, and together they offer a compelling new avenue of investigation into his work.

By attending to the cultural and historical specificity of Delacroix’s Moroccan oeuvre, we can address some of the suspicions aroused by postcolonial criticism, particularly with regard to masculinity. In Delacroix’s images and writings, Moroccan men bear little resemblance to the feminized subaltern that is such a figurehead of Anglo-American postcolonial criticism, beginning with the work of Said himself.³³ Said argues that European authors, like Gustave Flaubert, saw the “Orient” as feminized: describing writers from the 1870s to the early twentieth century, Said claims that “every one of them kept intact the separateness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability.”³⁴ As he puts it, “French scholars, administrators, geographers, and commercial agents poured out their exuberant activity onto the fairly supine, feminine Orient.”³⁵ This language demasculinizes the so-called Orient and elides the overarching geographical construct with the many varied peoples who lived there. Further, it attributes to the nineteenth-century Maghreb (or western North Africa) European stereotypes about eastern North Africa (chiefly Egypt) and parts of the Eastern Mediterranean.³⁶ Scholars of French colonial and North African history would no doubt take issue with Said’s characterization of North Africa as “supine,” given the persistence and vigor of the resistance movements against colonization and other forms of imperialism, particularly in Algeria. As Susan Gilson Miller points out, both colonial and postcolonial historians of Morocco long had a tendency to treat the kingdom’s loss of independence in the twentieth century inaccurately as the inevitable result of its own “passive or bungling” policies.³⁷ There is a fine line between calling out stereotypes and inadvertently reproducing them by imputing a meaning or failure that is not actually present in the particular case under examination. If we expect Delacroix or any other nineteenth-century French artist to represent North Africans of any ethnicity as feminized subalterns, then we run the risk of reifying the very prejudices Said and others sought to dismantle. To gain meaningful insights into Delacroix’s representations of Moroccan men, it is necessary to eschew broad generalizations in exchange for an investigation of the specific cultural and political circumstances that informed his understanding of them.

Delacroix’s Interpretations of North Africa

Delacroix left little written testimony of his views on the Algerian conquest, but there are two documents that shed some light on the question.³⁸ The first of these, drafted in the mid-1830s, not long after his North African trip, is a proposal to the government for a suite of paintings in the entry hall of the Palais Bourbon. In his description of the subjects for these pictures, Delacroix conjures a vision of French Christian civilization that needed to be protected from destruction by Muslim cultures. This document has given rise to the impression that Delacroix was sympathetic to the notion that France had a “civilizing mission” in the Muslim world, because he characterized the French conquest of Algiers in heroic terms.³⁹ He writes, “The vengeance of an affront to our deputy would change the face of North Africa and establish the rule of law in place of a brutal despotism.”⁴⁰ The despotism to which Delacroix refers was not, however, that of native Algerians but rather of the Ottoman Empire, a polity that had long both attracted and repelled him. This portrayal of the Algerian conflict might, at first, suggest that Delacroix accepted the widely propounded claim that France “liberated” Algeria from the autocratic control of the Turks.⁴¹ On the other hand, the obsequious tone of his language throughout this document implies that the artist’s desire to obtain the commission played a significant role in determining both his language and his choice of themes.

Delacroix expresses a strikingly different view of the situation less than a decade after crafting his ingratiating proposal. While writing a draft in the early 1840s of a memoir of his North African trip, he sharply criticizes French destruction of mosques and cemeteries in Algiers and decries French affronts to the religious and family feelings of Algerians: “The sap and the mine, those instruments of progress, have gotten the best of the mosques that were good for nothing but blocking the public way; and, on the same pretext, we have had the barbarous audacity to raze the Moorish cemeteries on the outskirts of the cities, where I saw still-recent tombs torn out and piled with rubble, to the great and legitimate outrage of the sons, fathers, husbands, reduced to watching the remains of the objects of their tenderness [be] disturbed and exposed to the light.”⁴² Delacroix’s language makes clear his disgust with French modernization projects in Algeria and with the aggressive disrespect shown to Algerians in their implementation. The mosques to which he refers were probably the Mosque es-Sayyid (formerly in the main market square of the Casbah, destroyed by the French in 1830) and the Mosque el-Djedid, which the French were planning to raze when Delacroix visited Algiers in 1832.⁴³ Unlike other commentators, who lament these transformations only because they eliminated picturesque streets and buildings, Delacroix is angered by the ethical violations of French colonization. In fact, he condemns the brutish tactics of the French explicitly: “The respect and superstitious devotion of the Orientals for their dead is well known; it will thus be easy to understand the bitter feelings, the redoubtable rancor such measures must have awakened in hearts already little disposed to tenderness for the kind deeds of our domination.”⁴⁴ As Michèle Hannoosh argues, Delacroix uses irony here to criticize the so-called civilizing mission of the French.⁴⁵ While it is possible that his opinion may have changed over the course of the decade that separates the two documents, it seems more likely that his memoir reflects his views accurately. Regardless, Delacroix’s statements as a private citizen show that he regarded the colonization of Algeria in a negative light; accordingly it seems reasonable to assume that he disagreed with French attacks on Morocco, a country in which he was much more emotionally invested.

Delacroix’s attitudes toward Moroccans are most clearly elucidated by his notebooks and letters from Morocco, as well as the memoir of his travels that resurfaced in 1997 after being lost for many years.⁴⁶ My study draws extensively on this rich resource, which sheds light on the artist’s experiences in Morocco and his interpretations of the people he encountered there. At some point in the early 1840s, most likely 1843, Delacroix wrote the first portion of his memoir and made notes for subsequent chapters.⁴⁷ Although his friend Achille Piron mentioned this manuscript in an 1865 biography of the artist, the documents themselves remained unknown until Hannoosh rediscovered them in 1997. This manuscript has exciting implications for our understanding of Delacroix’s Moroccan sojourn and its impact on his artistic production. My investigation of Delacroix’s images of Moroccan men also uses Hannoosh’s superb edition of his Journal, published in 2009. This remarkable volume offers a wealth of new material written by Delacroix as well as abundant, meticulously researched annotations of his writing, and it serves as a cornerstone for my study.

My investigation of Delacroix’s representations of Moroccan men is both thematic and chronological, moving from his earliest ideas about Muslims in the 1820s to his last paintings of Moroccan soldiers in the 1850s. Chapter 1 sets up the framework for my analysis by assessing Delacroix’s belief that he would see people who were “something like Turks” once he arrived in Morocco. To discover the scope of his expectations, I explore his representations of Turks in the 1820s with special attention to The Massacres of Chios (1824; see fig. 3) and The Death of Sardanapalus (1827–28; see fig. 9). Before the 1830 invasion of Algeria, French attitudes toward Muslims relied heavily on interpretations of the Ottoman Empire, which was governed by Turks and represented a threat to European political hegemony. Like many of his compatriots, Delacroix thought of Turks as cruel, despotic, and violent, but he also admired their clothing, equestrian culture, and military masculinity. In his pictures, he represented Turks as antiheroic figures who nevertheless possessed estimable traits associated with nineteenth-century French ideals of manliness. When he encountered Moroccans, Delacroix would set aside the negative characteristics he associated with Turks while expanding on his interest in the subjects of exotic dress and military valor.

Delacroix’s first impressions of Morocco and its inhabitants form the subject of chapter 2. When Delacroix arrived in Tangier in January 1832, he realized immediately that Morocco differed significantly from the Ottoman Empire as he understood it. Fascinated by the elegant clothing and dignified bearing of his Arab hosts, he compared them repeatedly to ancient Greeks and Romans. Focusing on Delacroix’s drawings, paintings, and writings, I examine his attribution of positive traits of French masculinity—self-possession, nobility, and sartorial sophistication—to the men he encountered in Morocco. I demonstrate that Delacroix’s adoption of a classical metaphor to describe what he admired had strong political resonances: his metaphor supported the autonomy of the Moroccan state and would later contradict the French military’s use of classical history to justify its conquest of Algeria.

In chapter 3, I investigate Delacroix’s paintings of Moroccan horsemen from the 1830s, which are some of the most exciting but least understood works in his oeuvre. Rather than amounting to little more than dramatized genre paintings, as has often been supposed, these pictures represent the Moroccan cavalry practicing military exercises, a theme with significant political implications.⁴⁸ For Delacroix, Moroccan soldiers were endowed with the heroic masculinity that was the stuff of great painting. He particularly admired the courage and leadership of the commander of the Moroccan Royal Cavalry, a man named Mohammed ben Abou ben Abd el-Malek. Yet Delacroix’s images also engage the issues of Morocco’s military strength and its potential for opposition to French imperialism in North Africa. In addition to addressing these questions, I explore the role of the Arab horse in Delacroix’s imagination as well as in French notions of manliness.

Thirteen years after visiting North Africa, Delacroix exhibited the monumental Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage at the Salon of 1845 (see fig. 51). In chapter 4, I examine Delacroix’s treatment of Moroccan leadership in this painting, the largest and arguably most important of his North African oeuvre. As noted previously, Franco-Moroccan relations had degenerated—briefly but decisively—to the point of warfare in 1844. Though inspired by this conflict, Delacroix ignored its negative implications for Morocco, manipulating his painting at multiple levels to create a powerful image of Moroccan sovereignty. The assertive, even subversive, message of his picture placed it at odds with the triumphalist paintings of French domination over North Africa exhibited alongside it at the Salon.

I conclude my study in chapter 5 with a discussion of the changes that occurred in Delacroix’s Moroccan paintings after 1845. Here, I investigate the artist’s response to a constellation of new circumstances in his images of Moroccan men, including the Moroccan defeat in the conflicts with France in 1844, the growing temporal gulf between the present and the artist’s 1832 trip, changes in the art market, and the concomitant decline of history painting in favor of other genres of art. My evaluation of these paintings shows that Delacroix continued to privilege the active, powerful form of masculinity he had admired in Morocco in 1832. At the same time, however, he began to use these pictures to explore the theoretical issues that became increasingly important to him during the 1850s, namely the role of memory and imagination in producing meaningful, philosophically weighty images that could bridge the divide between traditional history painting and new forms of genre and landscape painting.

In the history of nineteenth-century art, Delacroix’s Moroccan pictures have been overshadowed by his early history paintings, like The Massacres of Chios (1824; see fig. 3) and Liberty Leading the People (1830–31; Paris, Musée du Louvre). Unlike these early works, the North African pictures do not fit comfortably into the dominant narratives of art-historical scholarship of the last fifty years: their political engagement is often subtle rather than overt, and their challenges to tradition are defter and less flamboyant. Our hunger for radical history painting, in the manner of Jacques-Louis David before the Revolution; or defiant socialist critiques, like those of Gustave Courbet; or even the coolly ironic images of modernity painted by Édouard Manet may have prevented us from seeing the significance of Delacroix’s Moroccan oeuvre—perhaps his oeuvre as a whole—in all its fullness. When we shift the terms of analysis, Delacroix’s Moroccan pictures emerge as powerful meditations on heroism, masculinity, representation, and imperialism. Examining the intertwined effects of masculine ideals, artistic ambitions, and cross-cultural encounters on Delacroix’s depictions of Moroccan men reveals what was at stake in these paintings: a new form of heroic agency that spoke forcefully to the political and aesthetic concerns of the day.

Chapter 1 From Chios to Tangier The Ottoman Influence

Eleven years after he returned from Morocco, Delacroix began to write a memoir of his experiences during his 1832 journey. In one of the drafts for this never-completed work, he muses on his expectations of what he would find in North Africa. “We imagined on the whole that we were going to see something similar to Turks,” he writes, continuing, “For an inhabitant of Paris, any believer in Mohammed is reputed to be a Turk.”¹ Delacroix’s ironic reference in 1843 to Parisian prejudice marks the distance from his own earlier belief that Muslims and Turks were one and the same. Once he arrived in Morocco, his anticipation of seeing people like Turks was overturned quickly. As he recalls in his memoir, “the sight of the first street in Tangier” was enough to make his previously held notions “vanish completely.”² Delacroix’s confession raises the questions of what precisely he thought he would see in Morocco and how his experiences there departed from his expectations. In order to understand how Delacroix developed his imagery of Moroccan masculinity, we must begin by examining his attitudes toward Turks, who had been an object of special fascination to him during the 1820s. At first, he embraced a stereotypical construct of Turks as wicked oppressors, most famously in The Massacres of Chios of 1824 (see fig. 3). Yet, even in this painting, Delacroix explored heroic aspects of masculinity in his Turkish villain. As this chapter will demonstrate, Delacroix’s interest in the martial mode of manliness, the masculine symbolism of the equine body, and the privileging of male adornment complicated his negative views of Turks and set the stage for his engagement with Moroccan men.

fig. 3 | Eugène Delacroix, The Massacres of Chios, 1824. Oil on canvas, 419 × 354 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

Delacroix’s initial conflation of Turks with Moroccans reflects the fact that European knowledge of Morocco remained fairly limited until the 1840s; the same was not true of the Ottoman Empire. European travelers visited Ottoman territories regularly during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and they often published illustrated accounts of their voyages.³ Controlled by Turks, the empire had extended over vast swaths of eastern and southern Mediterranean lands during its heyday in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By the nineteenth century, Ottoman possessions had shrunk significantly, and the empire was under constant pressure from hostile forces both within and without.⁴ Egypt, long governed by Ottoman-installed rulers, tried repeatedly to break away from the central authority. France and England each sought to exploit this interior tension in order to dominate Egypt and gain control of its highly important trade routes. For the French, this resulted in the short-lived (but long-romanticized) conquest of Egypt and Syria by Napoleon in 1798. In the Ottoman satellite kingdoms of central and western North Africa, state-sanctioned piracy created conflicts with many of the European powers (including France, England, and Sweden), as well as the fledgling United States.

Like many artists and writers of his time, Delacroix found the Ottoman Empire deeply alluring, and his pictorial production before 1832 reveals a particular fascination with Turks. He sketched and painted men in Turkish costume frequently, and he applied his newly acquired printmaking skills to Turkish subjects. Turkish figures and themes also appear in two of the most important paintings of his early career: The Massacres of Chios (1824; fig. 3) and The Death of Sardanapalus (1827–28; see fig. 9). These pictures are among the most intensely studied of Delacroix’s oeuvre, and their production, sources, formal peculiarities, aesthetic innovations, critical reception, and challenges to traditional history painting have all been examined closely. The links of both paintings to issues in French political culture have also received extensive scrutiny.⁵ The Massacres of Chios has been interpreted both as a vigorous condemnation of the Ottoman Empire and as a veiled endorsement of French imperialism in the Eastern Mediterranean.⁶ Neither of these readings, however, accounts for Delacroix’s sustained attention to Turks during the 1820s or his apparent admiration for the Ottoman Empire—themes I will examine in both The Massacres of Chios and The Death of Sardanapalus. My investigation of John Lambertson’s suggestive proposal that a contemporary event in the Ottoman Empire inspired Delacroix to paint The Death of Sardanapalus will show that Turkish themes influenced Delacroix’s interpretation of Sardanapalus far more strongly than has yet been understood.⁷ As I shall demonstrate, a reassessment of both paintings in light of contemporary French attitudes about Ottoman culture reveals that Delacroix saw Turks as antiheroic figures who nevertheless possessed traits that were commonly admired in nineteenth-century French constructs of masculinity.

The Antiheroic Protagonist: The Turk in The Massacres of Chios

Among the numerous incidents of civil unrest in the Ottoman Empire during the early nineteenth century, the Greek bid for independence stimulated Delacroix more than any other. From 1821 to 1827, this conflict roiled the Ottoman Empire and excited passionate reactions in Europe. Even before fighting erupted, Lord Byron had dramatized the Greek cause in his poetry, whose first French translations appeared in 1819.⁸ French public opinion was divided initially between liberal political factions, which championed the Greek cause, and conservative ones, which supported the Ottoman Empire’s right to sovereignty over Greece. As the war progressed, support gradually shifted to the Greek side. As Nina Athanassaglou Kallmyer persuasively argues, French visual and literary culture constructed binary oppositions between Greeks and Turks. Pro-Greek groups characterized the modern Greeks as civilized Christian descendants of classical antiquity, whereas Turks were cast as barbarous Muslim oppressors.⁹ Paintings dealing with the conflict appeared as early as the Salon of 1822, and in 1826, the Galerie Lebrun held its first exhibition in support of the Greek cause. Like many of his generation of artists, Delacroix shared this commitment to the Greeks, most famously manifested in The Massacres of Chios and Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826; Bordeaux, Musée des Beaux-Arts), painted for the 1826 Lebrun show.¹⁰ While the war for independence led Delacroix to embrace the Greek cause, it also introduced him to the Turks. His curiosity about them emerges in his work, where Turks occupy a unique position that reflects Delacroix’s conflicted feelings of admiration and antipathy.

Nowhere is this tension more evident than in The Massacres of Chios, exhibited in 1824 at the second Salon of Delacroix’s career. As it appeared in the Salon catalogue, the painting’s full title, Scenes from the Massacres of Chios: Greek Families Awaiting Slavery or Death, reveals the work’s focus: small groups of suffering and dead Greeks from the island of Chios.¹¹ These mournful figures represent the thousands of Chians who were reportedly killed or enslaved by Turkish forces between April and July 1822 during the repression of a local rebellion.¹² Rather than focusing on a single figure, Delacroix used the pictorial device of the group to create a particularized visual account of suffering.¹³ In the center of the canvas, a grieving woman supports her naked, dying companion. To the left, a wounded man, numbed by trauma, ignores the cries and clutching hands of his adolescent child. At the right, a disheveled older woman stares grimly into space, away from the corpse at her side. This lifeless figure is that of a woman whose hungry infant clambers over her body in a futile attempt to nurse at her breast. While these passages go a long way to communicating the extent of the Greeks’ miseries, the most explosive account of suffering within the painting involves the Turkish soldier and the Greek couple who form a pyramid above the old woman and the dead mother (fig. 4). The very narrative linking this small group is incendiary: with a naked Greek woman tied to his horse, an Ottoman cavalryman pauses to draw his sword against the Greek man who tries frantically to stop him from riding away. The extreme violence of this episode, with its implications of rape, torture, and murder, creates a sharp opposition between Turks and Greeks. If the Greeks were innocent, suffering victims, the Turks (here embodied by the Ottoman soldier on horseback) were sadistic executioners.

fig. 4 | Eugène Delacroix, The Massacres of Chios, detail of fig. 3.

In his eagerness to stir outrage at the Greeks’ victimization and condemn the Ottoman Empire, Delacroix created a painting with no heroic or redemptive outcome. Rather than embodying a collective of individual acts of resistance, the Greeks represent a fractured array of figures who endure their horrific fates submissively.¹⁴ In his thoughtful treatment of the dualism of Delacroix’s early protagonists, Roy Howard Brown proposes that the naked, dying Greek man in the center of the composition can be seen as the hero, albeit an “ineffectual” one.¹⁵ Yet the man’s extreme passivity and his role as simply one of many sufferers undermine this interpretation. While some courageous resistance is shown by the Greek man who attacks the Ottoman soldier, his attempt is clearly a futile undertaking that has no effect on the kidnapping. Though the Greek hurls himself at the Turk, the latter is hardly troubled by the act. Indeed, neither the weight of the Greek’s body against the Turk’s horse nor the fist clutching at his uniform has any physical effect on the Turk. He merely draws his sword—unsheathing it easily from his left side with his right hand—to stop the onslaught. The soldier’s complicated pose conveys a sense of mastery, which is further underscored by the fact that he simultaneously controls his rearing steed and repels the distraught Greek man. By placing him at the highest point of the pyramid of figures at the right side of the canvas—at the highest point of any figure in the composition—Delacroix emphasizes the dominance of his cruel antihero. In stark contrast to his pathetic and passive victims, the Ottoman soldier is an energetic, effective figure who displays what Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby so evocatively calls “phallic mastery.”¹⁶ Because he is the only one in the painting that possesses any meaningful agency, he claims the role of protagonist.¹⁷

The Turk’s active role in a painting without a distinct heroic figure is buttressed by his possession of certain highly prized qualities of nineteenth-century French masculinity. His status as a member of the armed forces is one of the most important of these traits. The soldier became an important model of manliness during the Napoleonic era. Whether praised for his exploits or honored for his service to the nation, the imperial soldier provided a paradigm of bravery, self-sacrifice, and embrace of duty.¹⁸ During the 1820s, this figure remained a powerful trope even as the Bourbon government sought to distance itself from the tattered and humiliated Napoleonic army. In defiance of the Restoration régime, artists like Horace Vernet kept the memory of the earlier campaigns alive by painting imperial subject matter and celebrating Napoleonic soldiers in small genre paintings.¹⁹ For Delacroix, the soldier possessed a more fraught, personal significance. His older brother Henry died in battle at Friedland in 1807, when Delacroix himself was still a child. Charles, his eldest brother, served for sixteen years as an officer in the imperial cavalry and an aide-de-camp to Eugène de Beauharnais, surviving two serious injuries and twenty months of captivity as a Russian prisoner of war.²⁰ Born much later than his siblings, Delacroix did not emulate the martial heroism of his older brothers. Whether he wished to do so is open to question: military service had led to the death of one brother and to the illness, poverty, and alcoholism of the other. During the late 1810s and early 1820s, when he ought to have fulfilled his own military service, Delacroix apparently took active steps to avoid enlistment.²¹

Despite his personal ambivalence about the military, Delacroix showed great interest in the martial model of male heroism that appeared regularly in battle paintings from the Napoleonic era. Pictures by Anne-Louis Girodet and Antoine-Jean Gros, who revolutionized the genre, influenced the young artist. Gros’s sketch for The Battle of Aboukir had a particularly strong impact (fig. 5). Exhibited at the Salon of 1806, the finished painting celebrated the role of Joachim Murat in the Egyptian campaign. In the sketch (as in the finished canvas), Murat rides calmly through the fray, while around him French soldiers slaughter their Ottoman enemies. Delacroix quoted one of Gros’s figures closely in The Massacres of Chios: his hapless Greek resister’s raised arms and awkwardly bent head echo the pose of the prone Ottoman man clinging to a French soldier in the far left foreground of Gros’s painting (figs. 4 and 6). Delacroix also reversed the roles of East and West: instead of a French soldier killing an Ottoman enemy, Delacroix painted an Ottoman soldier killing a Greek civilian. This visual parallel shows that Delacroix must have seen some version of The Battle of Aboukir by 1824. Although the finished final version was still in Naples, Delacroix probably saw the sketch for Aboukir when he visited Gros’s studio in 1822.²² As he recalled many years later, he asked Gros to let him see “his famous paintings of the empire that, at that time, were hidden in the shadows of his studio, unable to be exposed to the light of day because of the era and the subjects. He left me there for four hours, alone or with him, in the midst of his painted sketches [and] his preparatory drawings.”²³ As Francis Haskell observes, Delacroix also borrowed from Géricault’s 1812 Charging Chasseur of the Imperial Guard (fig. 7).²⁴ Bedecked in a glorious uniform, this Napoleonic cavalryman twists back in his saddle, mastering a complex pose in much the same fashion as Delacroix’s Turk. For his representation of the Ottoman soldier, then, Delacroix sought inspiration in the work of artists who had created distinguished visual models of French military masculinity.

fig. 5 | Antoine-Jean Gros, Murat Defeating the Turkish Army at Aboukir (sketch for The Battle of Aboukir), 1806. Oil on canvas mounted on board, 88 × 138 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts. © Detroit Institute of Arts / Bridgeman Images.

fig. 6 | Antoine-Jean Gros, Murat Defeating the Turkish Army at Aboukir (sketch for The Battle of Aboukir), detail of fig. 5.

fig. 7 | Théodore Géricault, Charging Chasseur of the Imperial Guard, 1812. Oil on canvas, 349 × 266 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

Although Delacroix had given the Turk the role of protagonist, he took pains to make his antiheroism unmistakable, and he used stereotypes about the Ottoman Empire to do so. The most obvious element of the Turk’s antiheroism is his cruel treatment of the Greek woman: after tearing her clothes half from her body, he has tied her to his horse. Naked and struggling against her bonds, the woman’s circumstances signal an eventual outcome of rape. In inventing this scenario, Delacroix drew on widespread reports in newspapers and other print media about Greek women being sold into sexual slavery or forced to join Turkish harems. The Journal des Débats, one of the newspapers Delacroix read during this period, stressed this theme in its coverage of the events at Chios in 1822.²⁵ Colonel Olivier Voutier, whom Delacroix consulted in the early stages of his preparations for The Massacres of Chios, also emphasized accounts of sexual enslavement in the memoirs he published in 1823.²⁶ As Fraser shows, such tales were certainly not limited to these sources and would have been well known to Salon audiences.²⁷ Though designed to inspire maximum outrage on behalf of the Greeks, the kidnapped woman can also be interpreted as a rather aggressive figure. Painted with virtuoso brushwork, her outstretched body and fleshy curves stirred more than indignation in some of the painting’s viewers. One anonymous Salon critic, intellectualizing his admiration, wrote, “The torso of the young woman . . . is not less remarkable for the delicacy and energy [of the execution], and especially for the warm, bold touch [of the brush].”²⁸ Another critic expressed discomfort: “She is undoubtedly beautiful, but the more I find her beautiful the more her sufferings tear me up.”²⁹ Problematic as this figure may have been for nineteenth-century observers, her plight endorsed French stereotypes about Turks and their reputedly deviant sexuality.³⁰

With somewhat greater subtlety, Delacroix drew on another well-established European prejudice, this one regarding Ottoman conduct in wartime. As the Greek man attacks the soldier in an attempt to rescue the naked woman, he exposes his bare, vulnerable neck to the Turk’s sharp sword (see fig. 4). Delacroix hints at the tragic outcome of this figure’s resistance by endowing him with a head so awkwardly bowed that it is hidden from sight. Invisible beneath the man’s upraised arm, his absent head alerts us to the means by which he will die at the hands of the Turk.³¹ Imagery of Turkish-perpetrated decapitations abounded in French culture of the early nineteenth century. Some of the Napoleonic paintings Delacroix most admired, including Gros’s Battle of Aboukir and Girodet’s 1810 Revolt of Cairo, feature Ottoman combatants carrying French heads (figs. 5 and 8). The year after Delacroix completed The Massacres of Chios, the French artist Louis Dupré reported seeing “sixteen recently severed heads” during his travels in Ottoman-controlled Greece.³² Victor Hugo pushed this stereotype to its limits in his 1829 poem “Les têtes du Serail,” which imagines a conversation between the severed heads of three Greek men hanging on the door of the Turkish seraglio.³³ In his journal in 1822, Delacroix noted a story his brother Charles had told him about Turks decapitating their injured or captured opponents after battle: “When Turks find the wounded on the battlefield or even prisoners, they tell them: ‘Nay bos’ (do not be afraid), and striking them in the face with their sabers, which makes them lower their heads, they send [the heads] flying.”³⁴ Two years later, he recounted a tale he heard from Colonel Voutier in which the head of a French military officer had to be ransomed from a Turkish ship.³⁵

Delacroix’s representation of the Ottoman soldier’s emotional state further reiterates nineteenth-century French prejudices against Turks (and Muslims more broadly). Although most of his face is visible, the Turk’s downcast eyes and luxuriant moustache hide his expression, thereby creating an effect of detachment (see fig. 4). His aura of unconcern is heightened by its juxtaposition with the expressivity of his dappled mount. With rolling eyes and foaming mouth, the horse rears into the air and flattens its ears against its head in clear distress. Pictorially, the beast’s agitation emphasizes the indifference of the man, who calmly commits not one but two highly sadistic acts (murder and physical brutality). Salon critics responded warmly to this emotional coolness. One anonymous writer used the opposition between horse and rider to interpret the Turk’s lack of affect as evidence of viciousness: “A Muslim, hand on his scimitar, rides a charger whose trembling and ardor contrast with the impassive ferocity of his master.”³⁶ Here, contradictory stereotypes of bloodlust and aloofness intertwine.

Indeed, the term sangfroid appears repeatedly in the contemporary criticism of The Massacres of Chios, and it is paired consistently with references to Islam. Though the French word means “composure,” its literal meaning, “cold blood,” resonates throughout the 1824 commentaries. A critic who called himself the “Amateur sans prétentions,” for example, describes the Turkish soldier in the background as a “Muslim, filled with a ferocious sangfroid mixed with contempt, and killing Christians like vile animals that are sacrificed without pity.”³⁷ Adolphe Thiers, Delacroix’s champion in 1822, decried the way that “the proud Muslim, contemptuous of the feeble resistance [of the Greek], draws his saber without anger, and is about to strike the young man with a dreadful sangfroid and a familiarity with murder.”³⁸ This vision receives elaboration at the hands of another anonymous critic: “The warrior draws his sword with a horrible sangfroid. One sees that he has eaten his fill of murders, and that he will sacrifice still more new victims, equally without pleasure as without regrets.”³⁹ This observer attributes the Turk’s dispassionate cruelty to overindulgence: too much sadism has dulled his senses. Lack of expressivity was seen to be a distinctively Turkish (or “Oriental”) characteristic, and it surfaced in many European travel accounts and histories. Charles Lacretelle, an eighteenth-century French traveler to the Ottoman Empire, for example, claimed that among Turkish men, “each seems to guard himself against violent emotions; when he feels them, he fears to let them appear; under the mask of an imperturbable gravity, he conceals the pleasures he receives.”⁴⁰

One striking aspect of these descriptions is that while they cast Turkish sangfroid as a sign of brutality, composure was a cherished attribute of several types of nineteenth-century French masculinity. Derived from Stoic models, emotional self-mastery emerged as a key paradigm in the courtly culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.⁴¹ Though eclipsed somewhat by the cult of sensibilité in the eighteenth century, sangfroid remained a prized virtue in French military culture. With the advent of the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, composure regained its privileged position in male comportment.⁴² By the 1860s, an extreme form of sangfroid would become a constitutive element of the Baudelairean dandy. In 1863, Charles Baudelaire would argue that “the dandy aspires to insensitivity,” elaborating, “The distinguishing characteristic of the dandy’s beauty consists above all in an air of coldness which comes from an unshakeable determination not to be moved.”⁴³ In this regard, Delacroix’s Ottoman antihero and indeed the many early nineteenth-century stereotypes about Turks in general foreshadow the birth of the Baudelairean dandy. During the 1820s, however, composure still remained a firmly post-Revolutionary value with roots in antique Stoicism. Despite his Romantic leanings, even the youthful Delacroix wished to cultivate greater sangfroid. Writing in his journal shortly after finishing Massacres of Chios, he reflected on “the composure [sangfroid] that an ordered life brings” and encouraged himself to adopt a more focused and solitary lifestyle to achieve it.⁴⁴ Delacroix’s Turkish antihero points to the limitations, rather than the strengths, of this virtue, and the critics treated the soldier’s sangfroid as further evidence of his villainy.

The critics’ repeated characterization of the Turk as a Muslim points to another negative preconception undergirding Delacroix’s painting: the idea of Islam as a threat to Christianity. The critic who spoke of the Ottoman soldier’s gourmandise for murder called him a Muslim, opposing him implicitly to the Christian woman he abducts. The so-called “Amateur sans prétentions” went one step further, openly juxtaposing the Muslim Turk with the Christian Greeks he persecuted. Even the critic who contrasted the horse with its rider used the term Muslim to characterize the soldier. European hostility to Islam dated back centuries, and as Kallmyer demonstrates, the opposition between Islam and Christianity was central to French discourse surrounding the Greco-Ottoman conflict.⁴⁵ Although Delacroix included nothing in the painting that refers to it explicitly, religion was so much a part of the public discourse on the war that he hardly needed to do so. Impassioned by the Greek situation, he may have shared this stereotypical fear of Islam. In an 1823 project for a painting, he cast Muslim Turks as threats to civilization. Writing in his journal, Delacroix envisioned an allegorical theme wherein “Barbarism dancing around the bonfire” confronts the “man of genius.” Barbarism, here, is represented by “Omars,” or Turks, who “throw books, venerable images, and the man [of genius] himself” onto the fire.⁴⁶ In Delacroix’s somewhat confused verbal sketch, Turks wantonly destroy the attributes of civilization and attempt to annihilate Genius itself. This characterization reveals a highly negative conception of Turks that was shared by other French people.⁴⁷ Despite the fact that he made an Ottoman soldier the protagonist of The Massacres of Chios, then, Delacroix’s attitudes toward Turks reflected common prejudices of the day.

The Ottoman Antihero and The Death of Sardanapalus

Although Delacroix never executed his 1823 allegory of Barbarism attacking Genius, his vision of Turks putting culture to the torch resurfaced four years later in The Death of Sardanapalus, exhibited at the Salon of 1827–28 (fig. 9). Based on an episode from ancient Assyrian history, the subject had been reinterpreted on the stage just a few years before Delacroix turned to it.⁴⁸ In the painting, Sardanapalus, the king of Assyria, confronted with a rebellion he cannot quash, decides to commit suicide rather than accept defeat. Before burning himself to death on a huge pyre, he orders that all his women, horses, and riches be destroyed in front of him. The explicit violence, absence of a moral lesson, and chaotic composition of the painting earned Delacroix a rebuke from the arts administration, which threatened to stop buying his work if he continued in the vein of Sardanapalus.⁴⁹ As I shall demonstrate, Delacroix’s most controversial history painting relies heavily (despite its ancient Assyrian subject) on his adherence to stereotypes of Turkish bloodlust and impassivity.

In its visual pedigree, The Death of Sardanapalus borrows from a wide variety of artistic sources, including Mughal India, Etruscan Italy, archaic Greece, and ancient Egypt, but thematically it owes much to negative French attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire.⁵⁰ Lambertson proposes that, in preparing his painting, Delacroix was influenced by his friend Charles-Émile Callande de Champmartin, who had traveled recently in Turkey. There, Champmartin witnessed the 1826 massacre of the Janissaries in Constantinople ordered by Sultan Mahmut II, ruler of the Ottoman Empire. Champmartin exhibited a large-scale painting based on this event at the same Salon as Delacroix’s picture. Although the two paintings do not look alike, they share similar themes of violence and attention to ethnic diversity (a particular characteristic of the Ottoman population).⁵¹ Lambertson’s argument invites us to consider other images of the Ottoman Empire that might have shaped Delacroix’s vision of the Assyrian king. Napoleonic paintings of the Egyptian campaign, for example, presumably contributed to Delacroix’s emphasis on brutality. Girodet’s scene of bloodshed in The Revolt of Cairo, which Delacroix saw at the Musée du Luxembourg in 1824, was a likely source of inspiration (see fig. 8). Painted for Napoleon, Girodet’s picture heroicizes the French repression of an Ottoman uprising in Cairo in October 1798. Gros’s ferocious battle paintings of Ottoman forces, especially the sketch for The Battle of Aboukir, doubtless affected Delacroix as well (see fig. 5).⁵²

fig. 8 | Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, Revolt of Cairo, 1810. Oil on canvas, 365 × 500 cm. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

fig. 9 | Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827–28. Oil on canvas, 392 × 496 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

In choosing the theme for Sardanapalus, Delacroix was probably further prompted by an Ottoman massacre scene painted by Horace Vernet.⁵³ After being exhibited at the Salon of 1819, Vernet’s Massacre of the Mamluks was purchased by the state and hung in the Musée du Luxembourg, where Delacroix surely saw it on one of his visits there (fig. 10).⁵⁴ As Champmartin and Delacroix would do in the 1820s, Vernet focuses on a recent incident of Ottoman civil unrest. During the early nineteenth century, Egypt was governed by an Ottoman pasha, Mohammed Ali, who sought to consolidate his power there. The Mamluks, an elite corps of the Ottoman military, represented a threat to his authority. In 1811, Ali lured the Mamluks into his citadel for an important state event and then set his soldiers on them, killing all Mamluks who were present.⁵⁵ In Vernet’s painting, Ali reclines on a terrace while his soldiers fire on the Mamluks in the background. Calm and composed, he reveals his determination through a slightly furrowed brow and a clenched left fist. Otherwise, he attends to the spectacle, hookah in hand, as if it were a form of entertainment. Vernet stresses the sumptuousness of the pasha’s dress and accessories: fur-trimmed silk tunic, billowing crimson trousers, bejeweled dagger, and a leopard skin laid over two Turkish rugs. Like Delacroix’s Sardanapalus, Vernet’s Ali rests in luxury amid the mayhem and murder that occur on his orders.

fig. 10 | Horace Vernet, Massacre of the Mamluks in the Citadel of Cairo Ordered by Mohammed Ali Pasha of Egypt (1811), 1819. Oil on canvas, 386 × 514 cm. Musée de Picardie, Amiens, M.P.2004.17.176. Photo: Étienne Revault / Musée de Picardie.

In addition to being inspired by themes of slaughter in French paintings of the modern Ottoman Empire, Delacroix included Turkish attributes in The Death of Sardanapalus. The many women in the painting, for example, evoke the mythic Turkish harem.⁵⁶ As Lambertson proposes, the ethnic diversity of the king’s servants and slaves reflects the racial blending for which the Ottoman Empire was known in Europe.⁵⁷ Even Sardanapalus’s shocking nonchalance in the face of torrid violence can be linked to European prejudices against Turks. We have already seen how Delacroix used the stereotype of excessive sangfroid for his composed Turkish soldier in The Massacres of Chios. In The Death of Sardanapalus, he combined it with another one, laziness. Recent visitors to the Ottoman Empire had made much of the languor of its male inhabitants. François-Charles de Pouqueville, in his 1805 account of his trip to the Ottoman Empire, claimed that the chief ambition of the Turk was to do nothing, even at the expense of death. According to Pouqueville, the elite Turk lived in a “softness” (mollesse) so great that he could no longer rise from his sofa unassisted, enervated by his “loose-fitting clothing, the cushion on which he lives, the voluptuousness of the harem, [and] the premature excess of pleasures.”⁵⁸ Comte Auguste de Forbin, arts administrator under Louis XVIII and Charles X, took up this subject in his 1819 account of his travels through Greece, Turkey, Syria, and the Holy Land. In Constantinople, he reports, “Solemn Muslims, settled in a kiosk over the sea, slowly smoke a pipe full of perfumes, and regret paying for the pleasure of taking coffee with the fatigue of drinking it.”⁵⁹ Drugged by tobacco and lassitude, these Turks can hardly exert the effort necessary to sip coffee. Forbin’s vignette echoes both Pouqueville’s 1805 claims and those of Lacretelle, who writes, “In Oriental customs [moeurs], everything is directed towards calm and indolence.”⁶⁰ Similarly, François-René de Chateaubriand, in his 1811 Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, argues that the Turks “spent their days ravaging the world, or sleeping on a rug in the midst of women and perfumes.”⁶¹ Delacroix explored this stereotype in several studies produced during the years between The Massacres of Chios and The Death of Sardanapalus.⁶² His 1825 Turk Seated on a Sofa Smoking, for example, depicts a man sitting on a low couch with his legs loosely crossed and a pipe in one hand (fig. 11). While this work is, in many ways, a costume study, Delacroix’s choice of narrative—pipe-smoking leisure—participates in the notion that Turks were indolent.

fig. 11 | Eugène Delacroix, Turk Seated on a Sofa Smoking, 1825. Oil on canvas, 24.7 × 30.1 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

The Salon criticism of The Death of Sardanapalus reinforced the trope of the slothful Turk. Auguste Chauvin, for example, asserts, “On seeing [Sardanapalus] one believes that he is but an indifferent spectator at the sacrifice. Stretched out idly on a day-bed, [he] tastes the last pleasure[s] of being obeyed without question and of dashing the hopes of his enemies.”⁶³ Louis Vitet, reviewer for the Globe, suggests that the monarch’s passivity was caused by overstimulation: “One senses that the despair [of the women] only skims over, so to speak, this soul dulled by delights.”⁶⁴ The belief that sensual excess generated apathy, evident in Pouqueville’s account, was a common French explanation for alleged Turkish laziness.⁶⁵ As we have seen, at least one critic of The Massacres of Chios attributed the Ottoman soldier’s lack of feeling to his immoderate exercise of murder. For critics in 1828, Sardanapalus’s inactivity and lack of expressivity fortified his antiheroic status by suggesting that he had overindulged in both pleasure and abuse. As pictures like Champmartin’s Massacre of the Janissaries and Vernet’s Massacre of the Mamluks demonstrate, such acts were imagined to be constitutive of Ottoman leadership practices. Delacroix’s painting extends them to ancient Assyria.

Turkish Culture and French Art

The violence and decadence inherent in both of Delacroix’s Turkish-inspired antiheroes (Sardanapalus and the Ottoman soldier from The Massacres of Chios) attest to his youthful complicity with Orientalist stereotypes of Turkish men. But there were aspects of Turkish culture that were less ideologically weighted, and these too stimulated the artist’s imagination. Ottoman horsemanship and costume particularly intrigued Delacroix. As I shall explain, these categories resonated strongly both with aesthetic transformations and with French notions of masculinity in the first half of the nineteenth century. Before launching into this analysis, let me provide a brief sketch of the salient elements of horsemanship and costume that will be explored in greater depth in the pages that follow. As Marc Gotlieb demonstrates, horses took on a new importance for French artists during the nineteenth century as the equine body increasingly replaced the human body as the platform on which mastery of complex anatomy could be showcased.⁶⁶ Thanks in part to their association with the military, the animals were also a crucial symbol of French manliness, and Turks were imagined to possess horses that were far superior in appearance, agility, and temperament to French breeds.⁶⁷ The emergence of the dandy as a model of masculinity, with his embrace of sartorial elegance and impeccable grooming, also made Turkish men noteworthy to French painters like Delacroix. As my investigation will reveal, the opulence and visual interest of Ottoman clothing appealed to many French artists because of the growing importance of costume-based history and genre painting.

While horses had long been a symbol of and accessory for male heroism, power, and nobility, they became especially critical to French conceptions of masculinity during the first half of the nineteenth century. The successive waves of Anglomania that gripped French culture beginning in the late eighteenth century made horses more significant to French notions of male authority and fashionability.⁶⁸ Later, horsemanship would become important to both men and women as the rising middle class increasingly sought to emulate aristocratic equestrian culture, especially after midcentury.⁶⁹ During the First Empire, as we have seen, the soldier was touted as the embodiment of manly courage and virtue. The large number of cavalry deployed in the Napoleonic battle campaigns meant that horses played a crucial role in the fighting; consequently, they became the subject of intensifying scrutiny and fascination.⁷⁰ In order to triumph in war, the army needed agile, fearless horses to carry its soldiers. In addition to giving rise to a renaissance in French horse breeding and popular enthusiasm for the animals, the Napoleonic campaigns led to the rediscovery of the so-called Arab horse. Frenchmen at the beginning of the nineteenth century used the term initially to describe a variety of equine breeds from the Muslim world, ranging from Morocco to Iran. Within this area, the Ottoman Empire controlled most of the territories associated with high-quality horse breeding, including Syria and much of modern-day Iraq.⁷¹ Napoleon and his army discovered these animals and their skilled Ottoman riders during the Egyptian campaign, where they also learned that success in war, in the words of Nicole de Blomac, “depended first of all on the rapidity [and] maneuverability of the cavalry, and [thus] on the ‘blood’ of the horses.”⁷² French veterinarians, breeders, and equine enthusiasts believed that Turks and Arabs possessed superior animals because they had been more assiduous in preserving the purity of equine bloodlines and more attentive to the emotional intelligence of the beasts.⁷³

In The Massacres of Chios, Delacroix endowed the Ottoman soldier’s horse with a deep sensibility that underscores its rider’s cruel detachment from the horrific acts he perpetrates. After 1824, Delacroix continued to explore the theme of equine emotional response in his Turkish-themed pictures, but he did so in a more sympathetic mode. In his painting Young Turk Stroking His Horse (ca. 1826), Delacroix embraced the French belief that Muslim men shared a strong affective bond with their horses (fig. 12). This idea had been popularized in an 1812 poem by Charles Millevoye, in which an Arab man laments the death of his horse and extols its courage, protectiveness, and love for him.⁷⁴ In Delacroix’s painting, the Turk and his steed snuggle together in a tableau of intimacy: arching its neck to be caressed in an almost feline manner, the horse nestles its head against the man, who responds by resting his cheek against the beast’s neck and curling his fingers into its mane. Delacroix’s image was, no doubt, informed by the notion that Arab horses were more emotional than their French counterparts. Forbin, for example, had praised the expressivity of the horse he rode through the desert on a trip to Ottoman-controlled Syria. In his 1819 travel account, he wrote, “I often rode a little Arab mare, true model of beauty, speed, and sweetness: she was so affectionate and so tame that in the evening she would come and press her beautiful nostrils against my shoulder and take her part of the supper.”⁷⁵ In his painting of the young Turkish man and his horse, Delacroix depicts a similarly warm bond.

fig. 12 | Eugène Delacroix, Young Turk Stroking His Horse, ca. 1826. Oil on canvas, 32.7 × 40.7 cm. Villa Vauban, City of Luxembourg Collection, Luxembourg. © Les 2 Musées de la Ville de Luxembourg, 90. Photo: Christof Weber.

Delacroix’s sympathetic, even sentimental representation of the close relationship between the Turk and his steed reflects a larger preoccupation with this theme during the 1820s. While working on The Massacres of Chios, he focused on Turkish equestrian practices in a pair of aquatints, Turk Saddling His Horse (fig. 13) and Turk Mounting His Horse (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), both from 1824. The first features an attentive animal that pricks its ears forward and watches calmly while its master saddles it. The second represents the more passionate side of the beast’s nature: ready for action, the horse rears impatiently in the air while the Turk swings into the saddle. These prints are inspired, in part, by Delacroix’s increased interest in the Ottoman Empire during the early 1820s, but they draw on contemporary images by his compatriots. Carle Vernet, for example, produced dozens of prints of Mamluks with their steeds in the 1810s and 1820s (fig. 14).⁷⁶ Gros addresses a similar theme in two lithographs, one of a so-called desert Arab and one of a Mamluk, which Delacroix purchased in May 1824.⁷⁷ The emotional horses ridden by Gros’s battle heroes, like Murat in The Battle of Aboukir, undoubtedly inspired the young artist, who would later write about them in 1848 (fig. 5). The horses of Théodore Géricault and Jules-Robert Auguste likewise influenced Delacroix early in his career; in the 1820s, Delacroix wrote of his admiration for Auguste’s now-lost equine paintings, finding them superior to Géricault’s.⁷⁸ His distaste for Géricault’s horses, nascent in the 1820s, would flower by the 1850s, when he would describe them as deeply inferior to the horses of Antoine-Jean Gros and Peter Paul Rubens. Nevertheless, by the end of his life, Delacroix owned almost every lithograph of a horse Géricault ever produced, and both Lee Johnson and Michèle Hannoosh show that some of these inspired the artist’s later work.⁷⁹

fig. 13 | Eugène Delacroix, Turk Saddling His Horse, 1824. Aquatint with graphite additions, 26.5 × 20.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

fig. 14 | Carle Vernet, Mamluk and His Horse, ca. 1819. Lithograph, 20.6 × 40.1 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Andrew W. Mellon Fund, 1977.12.15. Artwork in the public domain; photograph courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Delacroix’s fascination with Turks and their steeds owed much to the rise of the horse in French painting. During the years of neoclassical dominance, French history paintings featured male protagonists whose perfectly muscled and often bare flesh embodied their moral virtue. As the French taste for contemporary battle paintings and pictures with themes from Renaissance history and literature grew during the 1810s, 1820s, and 1830s, the primacy of the nude male figure declined.⁸⁰ In paintings of this era, the human body is almost always clothed, so horses offered artists an alternative form with which to flaunt their mastery of anatomy.⁸¹ From 1824 to 1828, Delacroix applied himself to the study of horses. His drawings from this period bear witness to his preoccupation with all things equine, including skeletal and muscular structures, the shapes of hooves, the color of coats, the effects of death and decomposition, and so on (figs. 15 and 16).⁸² In his early journal, Delacroix exhorted himself to spend more time improving his representational skills: “It is absolutely necessary to start doing horses. Go to a stable every morning.”⁸³ In the three-year period covered by the early journal (1822–24), he records numerous trips to stables and notes an inquiry to the postal service about studying their animals. During the frenzy of work that preceded his completion of The Massacres of Chios in 1824, Delacroix sketched horses frequently. When he visited England in 1825, he observed and drew the stock of Adam Elmore, the renowned horse dealer and friend of Géricault.⁸⁴ In addition to these references, the hundreds of drawings both in his sketchbooks and on individual folios show that Delacroix spent a great deal of time studying horses. Over the years, he translated these drawings into paintings: at his posthumous sale in 1863, the catalogue featured thirty-six paintings (both finished canvases and painted studies) of horses in addition to dozens of genre and history paintings including the beasts.⁸⁵ The central position of horses in Delacroix’s images of Turks, then, was informed closely by his wider commitment to the animals and by the influence of contemporary culture.

Like horses, Turkish clothing appealed to Delacroix and other French painters both for its usefulness in the new aesthetic climate and for its links to contemporary models of masculinity. Delacroix gave dress a privileged role in his depictions of Turks, and his Ottoman soldier in The Massacres of Chios bears witness to this (see fig. 4). The Turk is clad in a silky pink turban, billowing red trousers, and a long black jacket adorned with sumptuous gold embroidery and gold-beaded trimmings. His jaunty appearance is complemented by his steed’s beautifully worked saddle and bridle. Even the soldier’s moustache, luxuriant and shapely, contributes to the overall impression of sartorial abundance. Delacroix’s painted studies of men in Turkish clothing, produced shortly after he completed his work on The Massacres of Chios, further reveal his fascination with Ottoman garb. In Seated Figure in Turkish Costume (1824–25), a French model wears a deep green Turkish coat embroidered liberally with gold thread and accented by a crimson lining and trousers and a purple sash around the waist (fig. 17). A similar garment, embellished by a vivid scarlet cape, appears in both Turk in a Red Cape (ca. 1825, private collection, Paris) and Turk Seated on a Sofa Smoking (see fig. 11). As Johnson observes, the latter is a costume study as well as a genre painting.⁸⁶ Here, the subject sits cross-legged on a low divan, smoking a long, elegant pipe, while his ornate yataghan (a Turkish sword) rests nearby. In both this painting and Turk in a Red Cape, the men wear narrow turbans composed of a coil of white fabric twisted several times around the head and red cap of the wearer. The consistency of the clothing items suggests a common source. During this period, Delacroix studied European prints of Ottoman subjects and even acquired several items of Turkish clothing and at least one saddle.⁸⁷ Earlier, while preparing The Massacres of Chios, he had borrowed Ottoman apparel from Auguste, who may have visited Greece, Syria, and Egypt around 1817.⁸⁸ A sketchbook from this era contains beautiful watercolors that attest to Delacroix’s close observation of Turkish accessories, like holsters and powder horns (fig. 18).

fig. 15 | Eugène Delacroix, Figure of Horse, Rear Leg (Profile), ca. 1820. Graphite, 13.8 × 9.4 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Album RF 9153, fol. 3v. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

While clearly inspired by his interest in Turks, Delacroix’s attention to Ottoman dress in his paintings of the 1820s was also linked to his broader preoccupation with costume. During this period, he filled his notebooks with studies of clothing from a wide array of historical periods and cultures. In one sketchbook that he used between 1820 and 1825, for example, Delacroix covered the pages with drawings of central European garb, French Renaissance clothing, and Spanish arms and armor copied from prints and manuscripts conserved in the Royal Library.⁸⁹ Another album from roughly the same time period shows an even greater diversity of sources: the pages are peppered with drawings of clothing and accessories from Mughal India, medieval Europe, and the Ottoman Empire.⁹⁰ Like his sketches, Delacroix’s historical and literary paintings of the 1820s, which focus heavily on past eras, rely extensively on clothing to denote time and place.⁹¹

fig. 16 | Eugène Delacroix, Studies of Horses, ca. 1818–26. Graphite, 24.1 × 17 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Album RF 9142, fol. 43v. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

fig. 17 | Eugène Delacroix, Seated Figure in Turkish Costume, 1824–25. Oil on canvas, 32 × 24.2 cm. Private collection. © Christie’s Images Limited.

Delacroix’s emphasis on dress was part of a generational shift in French painting away from the grand themes of neoclassical history painting, with its nude or half-clad protagonists, toward a more descriptive form of the genre that leaned heavily on local color, particularly clothing and setting.⁹² During the Restoration, paintings with themes from French history became more common, driven partly by the return of the Bourbon monarchy and partly by a desire to look at an idealized national past. At the same time, artists grew interested in anecdotalism and empathetic identification. The continuing contraction of demand for large-scale history painting, coupled with the growing market for genre painting, exerted a third influence on the shift in history painting. Together, these trends contributed to the emergence of the genre historique, a new mode of painting that combined features of history and genre painting. In these pictures, exemplified by the work of Troubadour artist Pierre-Henri Révoil and history painter Paul Delaroche, minute attention to details of costume and setting were the norm (fig. 19). Clothing was indispensable as a marker of a given historical era, but both viewers and painters prized the textural richness and evocative detail it supplied.⁹³ The new taste in painting and the sartorial sumptuousness that accompanied it likely helped promote the popularity of non-European subject matter. With a new range of costumes and settings, themes from North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean were perfectly suited to the aesthetic climate of the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Delacroix’s fascination with Turkish garb thus belongs to a wider aesthetic ethos in which dress occupied a central position.

In addition to their usefulness to these artistic trends, Turks provided a parallel to an emerging nineteenth-century prototype of masculinity: the dandy. The French dandy of the 1810s and 1820s differed greatly from the black-clad sophisticate described so famously by Baudelaire in 1863. These earlier French dandies focused primarily on the fashions introduced by the British during their 1816 occupation of Paris after the defeat of Napoleon and were therefore defined largely (if not exclusively) by an obsession with clothing and accessories.⁹⁴ In this context, Turks offered particular interest to the French because of the richness of their dress. Delacroix’s own painted studies of men in Ottoman clothing reveal his engagement with this aspect of their culture. The deep, vibrant colors of Ottoman garb, like the assertive scarlet of the long cloak in Turk Seated on a Sofa Smoking or the moss green of the tunic in Seated Figure in Turkish Costume, appealed to Delacroix (see figs. 11 and 17). Other attractive elements included the elaborate gold embroidery on coats, jackets, and vests; the inlaid handles of pistols; and the intricate metalwork of powder horns and scabbards (see fig. 18). All of these items attest to an imagined privileging of adornment by Turkish men. In the book Anastasius, whose title Delacroix noted in his journal in 1824 shortly after finishing work on The Massacres of Chios, the English author and designer Thomas Hope ascribes a dandyish concern for appearance to an “Osmanli” (or Ottoman) man named Aly: “Nothing could exceed the exquisite taste of his apparel. His turban attracted the eye less even by its costliness of texture than by its elegance of form. . . . If, despite all his pains, my friend Aly was not without exception the handsomest man in the Othoman [sic] empire, none could deny his being one of the best dressed.”⁹⁵ Hope uses language that figured heavily in both French and British characterizations of the dandy and other men of fashion: “exquisite taste,” “elegance,” and “costliness.” His Osmanli calls to mind popular views of George “Beau” Brummell, the English dandy renowned for his fastidious refinement, and prefigures Baudelaire’s midcentury dandy, a man “whose solitary profession is elegance.”⁹⁶ Hope also describes the prolonged toilette performed by Aly in terms that share much in common with contemporary French accounts of the lengths to which fashionable men went to achieve sartorial perfection.⁹⁷

fig. 18 | Eugène Delacroix, Holster, Powder Horn, and Two Small Pouches, from the “Bremen Sketchbook,” ca. 1823. Graphite and watercolor, 25.8 × 33.2 cm. Kunsthalle Bremen. Photo courtesy of Kunsthalle Bremen.

fig. 19 | Pierre-Henri Révoil, Convalescence of Chevalier Bayard, ca. 1817. Oil on canvas, 135 × 177 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

If Delacroix embraced negative stereotypes of Ottoman masculinity in The Massacres of Chios and The Death of Sardanapalus, he also explored elements that he and other Frenchmen sought to strengthen or even emulate in their own conceptions of manliness, like horsemanship and fashionability. His newfound fascination with Turks after 1824 undoubtedly contributed to his desire to travel to Egypt, a possession of the Ottoman Empire. As Grigsby points out, Egypt loomed large in the imaginations of artists like Delacroix, who, too young to have witnessed Bonaparte’s 1798 conquest, had been marked indelibly by the propagandistic but brilliant paintings by Gros and Girodet that celebrated Napoleon’s exploits.⁹⁸ During the hectic months while he was preparing The Massacres of Chios, Delacroix longed to travel to Egypt, believing that it would provide a necessary stimulus to his work.⁹⁹ On some level, he may have realized that the Turks he saw in Paris were not the men he would find in Turkey or Egypt, as he would later describe French Turks of the 1820s as “cautious, down-on-their-luck [déclassés] beings, wearing a beard and turban with redingote and boots.”¹⁰⁰ At the time, however, his desire to visit the Ottoman Empire burned fiercely. When the opportunity arose to go to Morocco in the last months of 1831, he snatched it, thinking he would encounter a culture informed by that of Turkey.

Chapter 2 Manly Restraint Costume, Classicism, and Self-Containment

Delacroix dreamed longingly in 1824 of visiting Egypt, but his desire to travel was to be fulfilled through a trip to a different Muslim country. Morocco, rather than Egypt, would be his destination, and his 1832 visit there produced unexpected changes to his ideas about masculinity and his attitudes toward Muslims, changes that manifested themselves in subsequent paintings. When he was asked in 1831 to accompany Mornay on a diplomatic mission to Morocco, Delacroix accepted with alacrity. The arrangements were concluded in some haste: shortly before leaving, Delacroix wrote to a friend, “Just now I am running after a pretty big project. I will probably have left for Morocco by next week. Don’t laugh too much, it is quite true. So I am quite dazed.”¹ Prior to this trip, Delacroix seems to have known little about Morocco, a kingdom largely closed to European visitors. Thus it is not especially surprising that he expected Morocco to resemble Turkey: “We imagined on the whole that we were going to see something similar to Turks,” he reminisced in 1843, continuing, “For an inhabitant of Paris, any believer in Mohammed is reputed to be a Turk.”² As soon as he arrived in Tangier in 1832, however, he realized that many of his preconceptions were skewed. In a letter he wrote the day he disembarked, Delacroix observed, “This country shows appreciable differences from the other countries of the Levant.”³ A month later, he noted in a letter to another friend that he found himself “in the midst of a people very different in many respects from other Mohammedan peoples.”⁴ In The Massacres of Chios and The Death of Sardanapalus, Delacroix had called on two conceptions of Turks: the effective but cruel protagonist and the passive, despotic antihero. Yet in his treatment of Ottoman horsemanship and sartorial self-presentation, he had also embraced positive qualities that resonated with contemporary French models of masculinity. In 1832, Delacroix transposed his fascination with dress, horsemanship, and manliness onto Moroccans, but he rejected the stereotypes he had previously associated with Turks.

Instead of evoking the dandified villain, as Turks had, Moroccans embodied a classical model of masculinity for Delacroix. In fact, it was the appearance of Moroccan men more than anything else that inspired him to write, in an 1832 letter, “Rome is no longer in Rome.”⁵ This comment, along with numerous others in a similar vein, indicates that Delacroix found what he saw as a new iteration of classicism in Morocco. Indeed, scholars have long argued that Delacroix’s trip to Morocco gave him a fresh understanding of the classical and made him look anew at an aesthetic mode that he had largely dismissed during the 1820s. Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, for example, proposed in 1916 that Morocco “reveal[ed] Antiquity” to Delacroix through its “types and customs” and that “the soul of Homer’s heroes escaped him up until the contact with these younger brothers of Priam and Agamemnon preserved by the Barbary soil.”⁶ For Moreau-Nélaton, what made Delacroix’s rediscovery of classicism important was the impact it had on his aesthetic: his paintings after 1832 purportedly unite classical and Romantic characteristics. While many scholars since 1916 have agreed with Moreau-Nélaton’s proposition, if not the paternalistic tone of his language, none address the deeper significance of Delacroix’s analogy.⁷

This problem is compounded by more recent interpretations that otherwise provide salutary revisions of Moreau-Nélaton’s views. Porterfield, for example, claims that Delacroix’s classical metaphor “awarded [Moroccans] none of the moral or philosophical connotations that made Greece and Rome the basis of the Davidian Revolutionary order.”⁸ Similarly, Grigsby argues that Delacroix “recast the North African rabble [canaille] as sanctioned, dignified models of beauty, now drained of the burden of Davidian exemplarity.”⁹ These judgments imply that images of North Africans can only be positive if they reproduce the politics (and even aesthetics) of David. In his examination of Delacroix’s later pictures, David O’Brien avoids the Davidian bias, but he argues that the artist’s analogy was a reactionary, primitivist response to modern life that allowed him to move “backward through history to a simpler time, free of the problems of modernity.”¹⁰ Since these interpretations either discount Delacroix’s claim that Moroccans resembled ancient Romans or detach it from his artistic concerns, we still lack an understanding of the politically and aesthetically provocative nature of his comparison and how it relates to his ambitions in the 1830s. Given Delacroix’s lifelong enthusiasm for classical literature and philosophy, his analogy demands further investigation.¹¹ What does it mean to say that modern Moroccans exemplify the cornerstone of Western civilization? In unpacking this question, I argue that Delacroix viewed Moroccans as avatars of a classical heroism that was both physical and political. In communicating this vision, he not only extolled the beauty of their dress and the nobility of their bearing but also emphasized the self-possessed masculinity that confirmed their social, sexual, and political autonomy.

Costume, Classicism, and the Moroccan Body

For Delacroix, clothing provided one of the first cues that Morocco differed from the Ottoman Empire as he understood it, and it did so quickly and effectively. In two letters penned less than a month after his arrival in Tangier, he observed that Moroccans were unlike other Muslim peoples, remarking upon the distinctive manner in which they dressed.¹² He also used clothing to illustrate the contrasts between Morocco and the Ottoman Empire in the memoir he drafted roughly eleven years after his trip. Recounting the welcome offered to the newly arrived delegation by the pasha of Tangier, Delacroix writes: “Nothing had prepared us for the majestic simplicity of this reception. Instead of the gold embroidery and luxury, if you will, with which our imagination adorns in advance a crowd of pashas, spahis, and bimbachis in parade dress or theatrical costume, we saw before our eyes three or four handsome white-bearded elders, covered in togas like the senators of Rome, without weapons or any sort of ornaments.”¹³ In this description, written around 1843, Delacroix juxtaposes Moroccan dress with the clothing worn by Egyptians, Mamluks, and Algerians in the streets and theaters of Paris (figs. 20 and 21).¹⁴ While Delacroix notes here the disparity between Ottoman and Moroccan garb, he also draws a more subtle distinction between a culture that had been repackaged for the Parisian metropole and one that he saw in situ. During the 1820s, Delacroix’s view of Turkish men as elegant and fashionable endowed them with one positive facet of nineteenth-century French masculinity. Despite the striking differences he observed in Morocco, clothing and bearing would play a similar role in his construction of the admirable qualities of Moroccan culture.

Delacroix’s interpretation of Moroccan dress and deportment directly inspired his famous assertion that Moroccan men embodied the classical. In a note written nine days after his arrival in Tangier, he describes the djellaba (a hooded tunic with sleeves) as “precisely antique clothing” that reminds him of a classical figurine he had seen in the Louvre.¹⁵ Six weeks later, writing from Meknes to a friend in Paris, he makes this connection more explicit: “You think yourself in Rome or Athens: the cloaks, the togas and a thousand of the most antique features. A rascal who repairs a shoe for a few sous has the dress and air [tournure] of Brutus or Cato of Utica.”¹⁶ Clothing links modern Morocco to ancient Rome here. By the time he wrote this letter, Delacroix had already learned the appropriate Arabic words for Moroccan garb, so his use of Western terms served a dual purpose: to make his analogy more readily comprehensible to his French correspondent and, more important, to reinforce the visual link between the two civilizations. In this passage, Delacroix also stressed that a working-class man (whom he calls a “rascal”) possessed this classical air. In other words, looking like senators of Rome characterized not just the aristocratic pasha of Tangier and his retinue but ordinary men on the streets as well, a point to which we shall return shortly.

Throughout his letters and drawings, Delacroix used the whiteness of Moroccan clothing to support his assertion that North Africa rivaled the classical past. In a letter written from Tangier in February 1832, shortly after he arrived, he argues: “The Antique has nothing more beautiful. Yesterday a peasant passed by who was got up like you see here. —Further along, here is the appearance of a lowly Moor to whom we gave fifty sous the day before yesterday. All of this in white like the senators of Rome or the Panathenians of Athens” (fig. 22).¹⁷ Delacroix’s last sentence demonstrates how he linked light-colored Moroccan garb to that of antiquity. Here, he was probably responding to the garment known as a haik, an enormous rectangle of fabric that was usually white and could be draped about the body like a giant scarf (see fig. 20, left). In the middle of the third page of the letter, the “lowly Moor” wears a haik wrapped at the waist and drawn up over his shoulders (fig. 22). A more detailed individual watercolor of this same man reveals the light colors Delacroix refers to in the letter and suggests that the sum of fifty sous was payment for posing (fig. 23).¹⁸ In this image, Delacroix explores the aesthetic potential of drapery: the man is clad in a loosely belted white djellaba whose voluminous folds of fabric merge with those of the haik around his waist to billow about his body. Above his shoulders, the top of his creamy haik encircles his neck like a cowl and frames his turbaned head. A butter-colored burnous (hooded cloak) hangs elegantly from his left shoulder. The only spot of bright color appears in the vivid red cord that hangs across his torso. While images like this emphasize the whiteness of Moroccan clothing, it is worth noting that Delacroix’s notebooks are full of sketches of men in brightly colored trousers and djellabas. In his letters and memoir, however, he omits this fact, perhaps purposefully, to strengthen his claims about classicism.

fig. 20 | Eugène Delacroix, Study of Arabs, January 30, 1832. Graphite and watercolor, 14.1 × 20 cm. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts. © Harvard Art Museums / Art Resource, New York.

fig. 21 | Jacques-Nicolas Paillot de Montabert, Roustam Raza, Mamluk of Emperor Napoleon I, 1806. Oil on canvas, 152 × 125.5 cm. Musée de l’Armée, Paris. © Musée de l’Armée, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

While the pale tones of Moroccan garments provided Delacroix with a compelling link to Roman leaders or Greek Panathenians, the volume of the drapery and especially the care taken in arranging it offered another important parallel. Writing to a friend about his first impressions of Moroccan men, Delacroix confided, “I was surprised beyond anything by the extreme simplicity of their costumes and at the same time by the variety that they know how to give to the arrangement of the pieces that compose it.”¹⁹ This mode of dress differed sharply from Turkish attire, which was much more complex due to its vibrant colors, luxurious fabrics, decorative embroidery, and numerous articles of clothing (see figs. 11, 21, and 55). Like Greek and Roman garments, Moroccan garb seemed to Delacroix to comprise only a few elements, which were enlivened by the individual manner of wearing them. French fashion trends, which stressed simplicity for male clothing, might have influenced Delacroix’s admiration for the Moroccan approach. Philippe Perrot argues that sartorial minimalism was increasingly privileged in France over the course of the nineteenth century, in part because of its antiaristocratic associations.²⁰ Yet in his praise of the plainness of Moroccan attire, Delacroix writes that it possesses “a quality of beauty and nobility that is staggering.”²¹ This correlation echoes a similar statement in a well-known eighteenth-century text by the Marquis de Vauvenargues, republished several times during the 1820s and 1830s, in which the author maintains that “nobility has an air [that is] easy, simple, precise and natural.”²² The link between sartorial simplicity and quasi-aristocratic dignity was one of the achievements of the ur-dandy, Brummell, whose direct influence on French masculinity began to be felt at the end of the 1820s.²³ For Delacroix, the plainness of Moroccan dress ennobled its wearers and made them look like ancient Roman senators.

While Delacroix’s vision of the regal Arab diverged sharply from the specter of the foppish Turk, his enthusiasm for Moroccan clothing in 1832 emerged from the same source as his interest in Ottoman garb during the 1820s. In part, Moroccan djellabas, haiks, and burnouses provided a new avenue for the exploration of costume-based history painting that Delacroix had begun in the decade before his North African trip. This theme remained central to his practice over the course of his career: in 1857, he noted, “Modern subjects [are] difficult to deal with, with the absence of the nude and the poverty of the costumes.”²⁴ Moroccan dress provided a way out of that dilemma.

fig. 22 | Eugène Delacroix, Letter to Jean-Baptiste Pierret from Tangier, February 29, 1832. Pen and ink. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

fig. 23 | Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Man Wearing a Haik, 1832. Graphite and watercolor, 29 × 20.5 cm. Private collection. © Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr.

Delacroix made this point vividly in his 1843 memoir manuscript, where he contrasts the appearance of the European consular staff at Tangier with that of their Moroccan hosts: “These [European] gentlemen had all come in full uniform to receive us politely on our disembarkation, and I confess that their drab, dark-colored clothes, next to which those of our officers made no better impression, seemed to me greatly diminished next to those of the Africans; and certainly a god come down from Olympus to spend a little time on Earth, and ordered to choose one or the other manner of clothing himself, would not have hesitated to prefer the majestic costume of the Moors, whom one could take, next to us, for so many kings.”²⁵ Brought to the Mediterranean world of the nineteenth century, Olympian gods would certainly, in Delacroix’s mind, prefer the “majestic” haik to the dull, almost pitiful European uniform. Delacroix’s 1832 sketch of an ordinary Moroccan man and an undated watercolor study of Mornay that he prepared for The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage emphasize the contrast between the two modes of dress (figs. 23 and 24).²⁶ In the latter watercolor, Mornay wears a neatly tailored uniform. Despite the gold braiding on the edge of his trousers, his clothing is sober and visually tepid. In the other watercolor, in contrast, the anonymous Moroccan man sports an enormous white haik whose folds and billows create abundant visual interest. With its fairly standardized cut and color, the Moroccan haik was as homogeneous as the French uniform, but it afforded greater possibility for individual expression thanks to the different ways it could be worn. For Delacroix, the classicizing haik and its stately aura provided the pictorial richness and visual impact he sought to create in his paintings.

fig. 24 | Eugène Delacroix, Count Charles de Mornay in Ambassadorial Dress, ca. 1832. Graphite and watercolor, 25 × 16.2 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

Clothing informed Delacroix’s belief that Moroccan men embodied the classical, but bearing also played a critical role in his attribution of antique qualities to Moroccan men and, as we shall see, in his understanding of Moroccan masculinity. In his letters, he claimed that a man who resoled shoes on the street had the “dress and air” of classical leaders.²⁷ Deportment was thus just as important as attire in making a poverty-stricken cobbler look like a member of the Roman elite. Delacroix’s drawings from Morocco help elucidate what he meant by air or bearing. In a graphite-and-watercolor sketch dated March 2 [1832], an Arab man wears a white haik over his cream-colored shirt and toffee-colored jacket (fig. 25). Wrapped thickly around him, this garment gathers and drapes in folds that are reminiscent of classical sculpture.²⁸ Indeed, this Arab man in his haik resembles a Roman statue of Caesar Augustus that Delacroix had probably seen in the Louvre (fig. 26).²⁹ Enveloped in woven abundance, the Moroccan model adopts an upright, slightly contrapposto pose. The combination of concealing drapery and dignified stance create an air of self-containment. Delacroix focused on similar elements in a sketch he made on April 3 in the city of Meknes, in which a Moroccan soldier at the left of the watercolor wears snowy white drapery that shrouds his body (fig. 27).³⁰ With his erect stance, shoulders thrust back confidently, the man possesses a steady, calm demeanor.

fig. 25 | Eugène Delacroix, Standing Moroccan from Tangier, March 2, 1832. Graphite and watercolor, 27 × 18 cm. Private collection © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

fig. 26 | Roman, statue of Augustus, first century ce. Marble, 207 cm high. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

fig. 27 | Eugène Delacroix, Four Sketches of Arab Men, April 3, 1832. Graphite, pen, brown ink, and watercolor, 18.4 × 26.9 cm. Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, New York.

In his letters, Delacroix describes Tangerine men of all social classes as looking like “consular dignitaries, Catos, Brutuses, who are not even lacking the disdainful air that the masters of the world should have.” This stately attitude was all the more striking to him because of the quotidian nature of some of their activities—“lying in the sun, strolling through the streets, repairing old shoes.”³¹ In his writings, Delacroix frequently emphasizes the low social status of Moroccans who possessed a classical appearance. By using this rhetorical strategy, he makes an implicit contrast with July Monarchy France, where clothing and deportment were highly differentiated along class lines.³² His comments also suggest that he arrived in Morocco expecting to be able to discern class difference using dress and bearing as a guide. He was confronted instead with a culture in which social class and appearance seemed less obviously intertwined than they were in France.

Delacroix explored the blurring of class boundaries he encountered in Morocco in one of the first paintings he made after he returned to France. Street in Meknes (1834) depicts several of the social types Delacroix encountered in Morocco (a Jewish woman, a Jewish boy, and two Arab men) and reflects his fascination with social class and religious diversity there (fig. 28). The bare feet of all four figures, the slightly dilapidated building behind them, and the guard sleeping in a darkened doorway show that this painting portrays poorer inhabitants of the city, a fact that Jo Ann Wein interprets as evidence that Delacroix embraced an ideology of North African inferiority.³³ But despite this apparent penury, the neatness of the figures’ clothing and their self-possessed demeanor indicate that they are not without resources. Financial hardship, here, does not translate to abjection: the Jewish woman and the young boy next to her are lively and engage with the viewer, while the Arab man in the foreground radiates composure and confidence from the enfolding warmth of his white haik. Moreau-Nélaton in 1916 describes the latter figure as sitting “in the pose of a Roman senator, and draped in a [haik] that makes one think of a toga.”³⁴ Speaking directly to his claim that poverty did not equate to misery in Morocco, Delacroix tells a friend in 1832 that the people of Tangier “possess nothing but a blanket in which they walk, sleep and are buried, and they have an air as satisfied as Cicero’s must have been from his curule.” Astonished by what he saw and convinced his friend would feel the same, he continues, “I’m telling you, you could never believe what I report, because it will be very far from the truth and nobility of these characters.”³⁵ Contrary to Wein’s notion that it served to visually disempower Moroccans, Street in Meknes shows Delacroix’s attempt to demonstrate his belief that destitution in Morocco did not deprive the poor of human dignity.

fig. 28 | Eugène Delacroix, Street in Meknes, 1834. Oil on canvas, 46.3 × 64.1 cm. Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Photo: Buffalo AKG Museum / Art Resource, New York.

In the paintings Delacroix produced after returning to France, none better illuminates his descriptions of self-assured poise than The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, exhibited at the Salon of 1845 (see fig. 51). The garments worn by Sultan Abd er-Rahman and the two cabinet ministers who stand next to him in the left foreground share the same complicated folds and heavy drape as the clothing in Delacroix’s Moroccan sketches. In combination with the classicizing nature of the garments, the static pomp of this scene and the solemn immobility of the figures create an air of gravitas. Critics who saw the painting in 1845 were struck by this quality. Théophile Thoré found that “all these figures are calm and noble,” while Eugène Pelletan reported that the sultan’s “step is serious [grave],” and his ministers have “a calm, proud air.”³⁶ An anonymous reviewer for L’Illustration praised Delacroix’s representation of “the simplicity, the seriousness [gravité]” of the Moroccans and commented, “All these figures at rest have natural dignity, and are treated with remarkable fullness.”³⁷ In 1845, critics accepted readily Delacroix’s notion that North African Arabs possessed a regal, self-contained bearing.

By the time Delacroix exhibited The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage in 1845, dignified bearing had become a particularly desirable attribute of masculinity for the rising French bourgeoisie. Georges Vigarello’s analysis of early nineteenth-century etiquette manuals and fashion guides documents the growing obsession with an upright posture that required a quasi-military rigor, in contrast to the curved spines and gently rounded bellies that served eighteenth-century aspirations to gracefulness so well.³⁸ Similarly, Perrot has argued that the new social codes for male deportment at midcentury demanded an erect, static stance that “inspired feelings of solemnity and gravity.” Behind this emphasis on physical poise lay “the ideals of self-control, self-possession, and the constant mastery of affect,” a kind of self-policing.³⁹ These ideas were articulated in contemporary works, like Honoré de Balzac’s 1833 Théorie de la démarche, in which the novelist proposed that stillness was essential both to noble carriage and to intellectual vigor. “Slow movement is majestic in essence,” wrote Balzac, whereas excessive motion revealed, and could even generate, stupidity.⁴⁰ Delacroix’s oeuvre, of course, is remarkable for its embrace of dynamism, so it is unlikely that he shared Balzac’s views about movement. On the other hand, his admiration for the self-contained demeanor of Moroccan men is undoubtedly linked to attitudes in his own society about stately bearing, physical self-command, and, as we saw in chapter 1, sangfroid.

Delacroix explored the relationship between classical gravitas and lively emotion in the work titled Convulsionnaires de Tanger, which translates to “Sectarians” or “Convulsionists” of Tangier, exhibited at the Salon of 1838 (fig. 29).⁴¹ Here, he paired the quiet reserve he admired with energetic ardor, a state of being with which his work is much more commonly associated. In Convulsionists of Tangier, Delacroix depicted a street scene in which male and female onlookers observe a ceremonial procession known as a moussem. The event seen here is led by the Aïssaoua, members of a Sufi sect founded in the sixteenth century by Abou Abd Allah Sidi Mohammed Ben Aïssa As-sofiani El-Mokhtari, known as Sheikh Ben Aïssa.⁴² In Delacroix’s picture, the Aïssaoua throw their arms up in the air, stagger, and even fall to the ground as they parade through Tangier. One man has to be supported by his companions; another bites his own arm, drawing blood. This conduct was a normal part of the moussem, but Delacroix stages it carefully in his painting. A crowd of people gather in the streets and on rooftop balconies to watch the spectacle. They react with varying degrees of excitement: fathers clasp their sons’ shoulders tightly, and one boy runs from the parade, as does a Muslim woman who has lifted her haik as she shies away. The men who flood into the street behind the procession seem to be more enthusiastic: it is difficult to tell whether they are members of the Aïssaoua or simply onlookers who are being drawn into the parade. In the right foreground, a group of men robed thickly in haiks and burnouses watches the proceedings with the detached calm Delacroix characterized as classical. Their juxtaposition with the fluid, contorted bodies of the Aïssaoua underscores their own self-possession and highlights the energy of the marchers’ movements.

fig. 29 | Eugène Delacroix, Convulsionists of Tangier, 1838. Oil on canvas, 95.6 × 128.6 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis. Artwork in the public domain; photograph courtesy of Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Because the Aïssaoua sect was all but unknown in France at that time, Delacroix must either have witnessed the moussem himself or heard an account from one of the European consuls at Tangier.⁴³ There is little documentation of the Aïssaoua prior to the twentieth century, due, in part, to the fact that educated Moroccan elites ignored the populist sect in their writings.⁴⁴ Today, the Aïssaoua practice the moussem on ‘Mawlid, the traditional birthday of the Prophet, but in 1832, ‘Mawlid took place on July 28, well after Delacroix had returned to France.⁴⁵ On the other hand, Julius Lagerheim, Swedish consul to Morocco in the 1830s, observes in an unpublished memoir that the Aïssaoua visited Tangier several times a year, so it is possible that they performed a smaller procession during Delacroix’s time in that city, perhaps at the end of Ramadan in early March.⁴⁶ In the album of watercolors Delacroix made for Mornay shortly before they returned to Paris in July 1832, he included a scene depicting the moussem.⁴⁷ The presence of this watercolor in what amounts to a souvenir album suggests that Mornay and Delacroix witnessed the procession together at some point on their journey. Six years after Delacroix’s death, his biographer Philippe Burty published a rather sensationalized tale that he purportedly received from Mornay about Delacroix and Mornay watching the moussem together. In Burty’s account, Delacroix and Mornay observed the procession illicitly and would have been “chopped to bits” (haché menu comme chair à pâté) had they been caught.⁴⁸ Contrary to these claims, it seems unlikely that non-Muslims would have been punished so harshly for seeing a public procession through the streets of cosmopolitan, diverse Tangier. Regardless of whether Delacroix actually saw the procession, the Aïssaoua were virtually unknown in Europe, and their moussem made an unusual subject that would have reinforced Delacroix’s authority as an observer of Moroccan culture, an ethnographic tendency that O’Brien notes in the artist’s other early works.⁴⁹

In the text that Delacroix provided for the Salon catalogue in 1838, he emphasizes the unruly aspects of the procession: “At certain times, [the Aïssaoua] meet outside the cities; and, stirring themselves up through prayer and frenetic cries, they enter into a veritable drunkenness, and, spreading next into the streets, they give themselves up to countless contortions and often to dangerous acts.”⁵⁰ Delacroix’s language exoticizes the Aïssaoua, yet by calling them convulsionnaires, a term used to describe eighteenth-century Jansenists, he likens them to early modern French Christians. To a large extent, the uncontrolled nature of the religious fervor described by Delacroix is contradicted by the painting itself. For one thing, Delacroix includes within the procession a man on horseback, probably a member of the Moroccan Royal Cavalry; rifles jutting out from the crowd in the background may also signal the presence of soldiers.⁵¹ From the perspective of form, Delacroix contains the Aïssaoua visually by packing the crowd of spectators tightly around them. The solid, blocky buildings framing the crowd provide a second line of restraint. Finally, the calm dignity of the three men in the right foreground, solidly enveloped in their classicizing haiks and burnouses, provides a note of reassurance, a reminder that the enthusiasm of the participants in the moussem is ultimately no cause for alarm.

In Convulsionists of Tangier, Delacroix attempted to create a scene that highlights both the self-possessed gravitas of Moroccan men and their ability to engage in passionate action, but his experiment with this theme produced reactions from his audience that he may not have anticipated. French critics, motivated perhaps by their own religious and racial prejudices, perceived the Aïssaoua as a threat. Frédéric de Mercey, for example, spoke of the “intoxication of fanaticism,” while Théophile Gautier described Delacroix’s Aïssaoua in animalistic, dehumanizing terms, characterizing them as an example of “madness and rage pushed to their limits.”⁵² Alexandre Decamps, trying clumsily to defend the painting, wrote, “It is not the fault of Mr. Delacroix if the religious history of Barbary peoples offers such bizarre episodes,” while an anonymous critic used the painting as evidence in support of France’s colonization of Algeria: “Mr. Delacroix has, with this picture, given us the most striking commentary on the customs [moeurs] of these barbarous peoples of Africa, against whom the civilization of France has for eight years supported a dogged and bloody battle.”⁵³ Perhaps encouraged by the artist’s text for the Salon catalogue, the critics’ obsession with the Aïssaoua overshadows every other aspect of the painting in their analyses. Nor did they temper their responses by considering this picture as one of a group of three: the two other Moroccan paintings Delacroix showed at the Salon that year were both unequivocally peaceful images, one about good leadership and the other about careful horsemanship (Moroccan Chieftain Receiving Tribute [see fig. 48] and Courtyard in Morocco [whereabouts unknown)].⁵⁴

From the point of view of its public reception, then, Convulsionists of Tangier was a failure in that its subject could too easily be co-opted by bigoted colonialist voices. Significantly, the Moroccan paintings Delacroix would send to the Salons for the next ten years depict scenes of quiet calm.⁵⁵ While he would later make two small paintings based on the central figure group of Aïssaoua men, Delacroix would never again focus on an aspect of Moroccan culture that could be viewed so negatively by his contemporaries. Although Convulsionists of Tangier remains an exceptional painting within his oeuvre, it nevertheless shows his commitment to exploring the classical Moroccan body as a force of social stability. As we shall see, Delacroix’s interpretation of the classical and his use of it in paintings differed sharply from prevailing conceptions of it in both art and political culture in July Monarchy France.

Masculinity, Sex, and Politics

In his emphasis on dress and bearing, Delacroix’s vision of the classical, as exemplified by Moroccan men, departs dramatically from the prevailing neoclassicism of his day. One of the hallmarks of this pictorial style consists of the meticulous rendering of the musculature of its male protagonists. Modeled on ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, the idealized form of the neoclassical hero typically indexes his moral fortitude.⁵⁶ The seamless, well-developed physiques of figures like the men in David’s The Oath of the Horatii (1784; Paris, Musée du Louvre) literally embody their political and patriarchal virtues. If neoclassical artists depicted Greeks and Romans as half-naked athletic types, Delacroix swathed his Moroccans in many layers of drapery that seemingly decorporealized them. To truly grasp Delacroix’s construction of classicism, it is imperative to understand that concealment, rather than display, is one of its foundational paradigms.

Delacroix eschewed the neoclassical tradition of perfect, sculptural anatomy in favor of a notion of classicism that was based instead on the posture and adornment of the body, but on one telling occasion, he invoked the body itself in his comparison. Writing from Tangier, he argues, “The heroes of David and company would look a sorry sight, with their rose-colored limbs, next to these sons of the sun.”⁵⁷ Thus it was not only clothing that made Moroccan men seem more authentically classical to Delacroix than their imagined Greek and Roman counterparts. The rich bronzed hues of the sun-tanned skin of Moroccan men were more credible to him than the pink flesh of the figures seen in neoclassical paintings like David’s 1819 Anger of Achilles (fig. 30), exhibited in Paris in 1830, or Gros’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1821; Phoenix Museum of Art).⁵⁸ Delacroix’s critique also implicitly feminizes neoclassicism’s male protagonists, who come off a “sorry sight” when compared with the more masculine “sons of the sun” in Morocco. To be touched by the sun, of course, one had to spend time in the open air. In 1843, Delacroix elaborated on the link he saw in Morocco between manliness and time spent outdoors. Without frequent access to the “free pure air of the fields and deserts,” he theorized, men become “unnatural and withered.”⁵⁹ For Delacroix, the brown skin of Moroccan men provided evidence not simply of their ethnic difference but of their active lifestyle and thus of their vitality. In his estimation, neoclassical heroes patently lacked this resource, as their pale pink flesh betrayed only too clearly.

fig. 30 | Jacques-Louis David, The Anger of Achilles, 1819. Oil on canvas, 105.3 ×145 cm. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Photo: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX / Art Resource, New York.

Delacroix’s obscuration of the sun-browned Moroccan male body in his drawings and paintings offers a new interpretation of the classical, but this concealment eroticizes it as well. Indeed, Grigsby aptly characterizes Delacroix’s Moroccan men as “monumental académies [male nudes] often mysteriously blanketed, erotically enveloped.”⁶⁰ The aphrodisiac potential of the hidden body is particularly evident in Delacroix’s images of Moroccan men at rest. In a watercolor he made in Tangier, for example, Delacroix produced an image that both evokes classical sculpture and possesses sexualized overtones (fig. 31). The young Arab man in the watercolor may be one of the guards who were paid to keep an eye on the European consulates.⁶¹ This figure’s open pose and concealing drapery simultaneously signal availability and inaccessibility, a combination with a strong erotic inflection. With his legs spread wide and his pelvis tilted forward, the man seems to thrust his genitals toward the viewer, yet the thick expanse of fabric across his body hides them completely. The man’s passivity and prone pose also suggest a languorous sensuality akin to the stereotypes associated with Muslim Turks and the harem in the 1820s. Delacroix further heightened this call to the senses by attending closely to the rich details of the setting in which the man rests. In contrast to these carnal intimations (or perhaps strengthening them all the more), the man’s watchful gaze and calm stillness imply self-containment. Similarly, the impenetrable white expanse of his haik denies the access offered by his pose. The ambiguity of this drawing, with its pairing of promise and refusal, is distilled in the rifle standing erect at the man’s side. This weapon, with its threat of violence, could be interpreted as either contributing to or defusing the erotic charge of the image.

fig. 31 | Eugène Delacroix, Young Arab Man in His Apartment, 1832. Graphite and watercolor, 19 × 29.8 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

The sexualized subtext of this watercolor provides insight into Delacroix’s conception of the classical ideal because it reveals his effort to rework the neoclassical prototype of masculinity in Moroccan—or what he called more authentically classical—terms. Hints of this reinvention lie in the Arab man’s pose, which echoes that of Dionysus/Herakles from the Elgin marble group (fig. 32). Delacroix had sketched this figure, using a friend’s drawings of the marbles, in 1824 (fig. 33), and he studied the group in the British Museum during his stay in England in 1825.⁶² At the time, the sculpture was identified variously as Herakles or Theseus, but Delacroix’s interest lay in the pose rather than the iconography.⁶³ Like the Elgin Dionysus, the Arab man reclines, leaning backward and slightly to the side with his knees bent and spread. By borrowing this pose and by emphasizing the classicizing aspects of Moroccan garb (milky colors, abundant expanses of drapery, and tactile folds), Delacroix translates the erotic appeal of the classical Greek nude to the concealed Arab body.

fig. 32 | Phidias, figure of Dionysus from the east pediment of the Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens, ca. 438–32 bce. Marble, length 130 cm. British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, New York.

fig. 33 | Eugène Delacroix, Study of Dionysus, ca. 1824–25. Graphite, 13.5 × 20.4 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Album RF 9145, fol. 25v. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

In neoclassical paintings, like David’s Oath of the Horatii and Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799; Paris, Musée du Louvre), the sexually charged body of the nude or seminude protagonist provides visual evidence of his strength and virility. These qualities, in turn, reveal his heroic masculinity. Delacroix’s modification of the classical prototype via the Moroccan man proposes that veiling the body has similar significance: concealment signals self-possession. In the 1832 watercolor, this bodily self-containment, along with the figure’s watchful calm, attests to a forceful manliness whose eroticism only strengthens its claims to power (fig. 31). Delacroix has embraced something akin to what Johann Joachim Winckelmann admires in the Laocoön group—Laocöon’s restraint in the face of physical torment—while rejecting the anatomical perfection and specificity praised by Winckelmann and the neoclassicists.⁶⁴ The vigilant stillness of the man in the watercolor shares much in common, too, with the French ideal of manly sangfroid, a quality Delacroix sought for himself.⁶⁵ Rather than being a passive object of desire, Delacroix’s reclining Moroccan soldier possesses agency through self-control. His suggestive pose hints at his sexual potency, but his cloaked body and alert demeanor demonstrate that he alone commands his sexuality.

Delacroix’s representation of Arab male sexuality departs dramatically from the stereotypes heaped on North African men by contemporary French writers and artists in subsequent years. Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Henri Regnault, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and others depict Arabs as hypersexualized figures typically falling into one of two general categories: the priapic sex fiend or the passive, feminized subaltern.⁶⁶ Such characterizations served very well the discourse of imperialism to which these authors subscribed. Visiting Morocco before the conquest of Algeria expanded, however, Delacroix envisions Arab men, like the one in his 1832 watercolor, in much more human terms and endows them with agency, manliness, and dignity.

In addition to using antiquity as an inspiration, Delacroix’s vision of Arab men as self-possessed classical figures borrowed from French Revolutionary ideals of masculinity. Speaking specifically of bearing, Nye proposes that in the 1790s, Republican “statesmen attempted to embody these stoic qualities [of a revivified classicism] by cultivating personal austerity and presenting themselves in public with an invariable reserve and dignity.”⁶⁷ As we have seen, this gravitas pervades Delacroix’s drawings and paintings of Moroccan men, reaching an apogee in The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage. Beyond a simple behavioral standard, the classical paradigm of self-containment could also serve more explicit political ends. In her analysis of conceptions of the body during the French Revolution, Dorinda Outram demonstrates that Revolutionary men used Stoic models of self-restraint to create an ideal of the body as self-controlled and politically sovereign. Strikingly, Revolutionary men of all political stripes compared themselves to Cato of Utica, the Roman Republican hero whom Delacroix invokes frequently in his descriptions of Moroccan men and whom he would paint on the cupola of the library at the Palais du Luxembourg in the 1840s.⁶⁸

Was there a political valence, then, underlying Delacroix’s assertion that Moroccan men possessed classical attributes? From a political standpoint, the names he used in his comparisons between Morocco and antiquity are highly suggestive. Both Cato of Utica and Brutus, another figure to whom Delacroix repeatedly likens Moroccan men, were renowned for their efforts to banish hostile outside forces from their polities. Nancy Finlay suggests that “this reference to Cato, the defender of Rome threatened with foreign invasion by Carthage, and Brutus, the ejector of the Tarquins, [was] perhaps an intentional allusion to current events in North Africa.”⁶⁹ For a man as well educated in the classics as Delacroix, the simile could hardly be haphazard. By using Cato and Brutus as parallels, Delacroix implies that the French constitute a threat to Morocco, which, like ancient Rome, would be protected by heroic leaders. In this construction, the French become Tarquins and Carthaginians, enemies of civilization. Delacroix’s analogy between Morocco and Rome is precisely the reverse of the approach that would soon be taken by the French government. The latter compared France to ancient Rome and argued that, like the Romans, the French should conquer North Africa, a point to which I shall return shortly.⁷⁰ By choosing as Moroccan analogues Roman men who were celebrated for their patriotic defense of political autonomy, Delacroix put the French in the role of barbarian invaders rather than victorious Romans.

The politicized aspect of Delacroix’s claim that Moroccans were the true remnants of classical antiquity echoes earlier theories about the impact of political freedom on physical beauty. Claude-Étienne Savary, in his 1788 Lettres sur la Grèce, proposed that the modern Turks, rather than the modern Greeks, most closely preserve the traits of Greek antiquity.⁷¹ According to Savary, Turkish men embodied in every way the beau idéal, the perfect male body that resembled classical sculpture.⁷² Savary also suggested that a warm climate played an important role in the manly appearance of Cretan Turks, but the thrust of his argument is that sovereignty enables the Turks to achieve a high degree of classical beauty. The modern Greeks, in contrast, had become polluted and ugly because they were dominated by the Turks. In Savary’s opinion, oppression leads to physical degeneration, and he uses the putatively unimpressive state of Cretan Greeks and their distance from their ancient forebears as evidence to support his claim. It seems unlikely that Delacroix would have shared Savary’s enthusiasm for the Turk as beau idéal, given his disinterest in the flawless musculature of neoclassical art. On the other hand, a clear kinship exists between Savary’s belief that political autonomy fosters classical beauty and Delacroix’s argument that the antique persisted in Moroccan men, who were members of a polity that had been independent of outside rule for nearly a thousand years.

Delacroix’s claims about the classicism of Moroccan men idealizes them by placing them on the same footing as the ancients, who had long served as role models for European leadership. Bold as this gambit may have been, it looks even more audacious when seen next to the classical analogy used by the French government in the 1840s and 1850s. French scholars, ideologues, and government administrators used a rhetorical device similar to Delacroix’s but with the sharply different end of equating the French takeover of Algeria with the Roman conquest of North Africa.⁷³ By likening themselves to ancient Romans, the procolonization factions sought to justify their so-called civilizing mission in Algeria and to portray themselves as an imperial force as mighty as that of ancient Rome. The official French position thus reversed Delacroix’s earlier proposal that Moroccans resemble the powerful leaders of Rome. If political autonomy, in Delacroix’s analogy, helped foster classical qualities in Moroccans, domination by the French would surely destroy them. Seen in this light, Delacroix’s characterization of Moroccans as embodiments of the ancients speaks with a quiet but insistent moral force against French imperialism in North Africa.

Modern Muslims and Ancient Worlds

As Savary’s example illustrates, Delacroix was not the only one to draw parallels between ancient Western civilizations and modern Muslim ones. In fact, Delacroix’s comparison may have been partly inspired by the ideas of Thomas Shaw, an English chaplain who in 1738 published an account of his travels in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean.⁷⁴ Shaw argues for specific formal links between Arab cultures and those of classical Rome and Greece, biblical Judaism, and early Christianity. Among the many connections he makes, Shaw speculates that the Arab burnous was identical to garments worn by Christ, as well as by Greeks, Romans, and Gauls. He also suggests that the haik resembled the Greek peplos closely and shared commonalities with the Roman toga. Shaw’s book was translated in its entirety into French in 1743, and his chapter about Algeria was republished as a separate book, Voyage dans la Régence d’Alger, in 1830.⁷⁵ Although Delacroix’s writings never mention Shaw’s work, the 1830 volume was used by the French government and may thus have been read by Mornay, whom Delacroix accompanied to Morocco.⁷⁶ Perhaps this is why, while waiting to debark from the ship in the bay of Tangier in January 1832, Delacroix wrote, “I have not yet seen those [Moroccan men] who are draped like Romans [à la Romaine].”⁷⁷

Shaw’s theories directly influenced one of Delacroix’s colleagues, Horace Vernet, whose claims, while quite distinct from Delacroix’s, are close enough to warrant examination. The differences and even conflicts between the views of Delacroix, on the one hand, and Shaw and Vernet, on the other, attest to what Sarah Betzer describes as the extraordinary polysemy of classical antiquity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.⁷⁸ Like Shaw, whom he cites as an authority, Vernet argues that modern Arabs embody ancient Hebrew culture, and he claims that rural Algerians inspire him with a new approach to religious painting.⁷⁹ Vernet visited Algeria for the first time in 1833, when Louis-Philippe sent him to prepare material to create pictures that celebrated French victories there.⁸⁰ In addition to providing him with fodder for his battle paintings, Vernet’s trip furnished him with a new pictorial vocabulary. Describing his experiences in a letter written during that trip, he characterizes a group of villagers not as Brutuses or Catos but as figures from Hebrew scriptures: “Nothing can better give an idea of our fathers in the plains of Canaan. It was Jacob and all of Genesis. If a history painter, like some I know, could see this! Or if I had the talent to take advantage of it, what a beautiful painting could be made!”⁸¹ Vernet decided that he would indeed try his hand at exploiting this new resource, and in 1835, he exhibited his first Algerian-inspired religious painting, the now-lost Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well that we know from a contemporary print by Vernet’s close collaborator Jean-Pierre-Marie Jazet (fig. 34).⁸² In this image, Vernet clad Eliezer in a white djellaba and striped burnous, clothing that was worn in nineteenth-century Algeria as well as Morocco. Eliezer’s headgear is the same as what was worn in Algeria: dark fabric twisted into a cord and wrapped several times around the white hood of his djellaba. This very clothing appears in Vernet’s The Arab Tale-Teller, a painting of contemporary Algerian men exhibited the year before at the Salon of 1834, down to the gray-striped burnous worn by both Eliezer and the tale-teller (fig. 35).⁸³ In fact, the only way in which the garb of Vernet’s Eliezer departs from that of his Algerian Arabs is in the footwear: Eliezer wears sandals, whereas the men in The Arab Tale-Teller wear slippers.

fig. 34 | Jean-Pierre-Marie Jazet, after Horace Vernet, Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, 1835. Engraving, 105.6 × 81 cm. Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

fig. 35 | Horace Vernet, The Arab Tale-teller, 1833. Oil on canvas, 99 × 136.5 cm. Wallace Collection, London. © Wallace Collection, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.

These visual parallels were not lost on the Salon critics, even at the distance of a year, and several objected to Vernet’s use of Algerian models for his religious painting. The contributor to Landon’s Annales du Musée argues, “This is assuredly not the beautiful biblical subject of Rebecca and Eliezer . . . that [Vernet] represents for us, but a simple scene of Arab life.”⁸⁴ Critic and budding abolitionist Victor Schoelcher protests, “Horace Vernet had to translate one of the most patriarchal scenes of the Bible, and these are flirtatious Bedouins he shows us! . . . Bedouins of Algiers to translate the Bible! Is there anything more disrespectful for art?”⁸⁵ Though this first attempt to make Algerian Arabs into biblical figures met with hostility, Vernet was not discouraged. In pictures like Hagar Banished by Abraham (Salon of 1839; Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts), Judah and Thamar (Salon of 1843; London, Wallace Collection), and Joseph’s Coat (1853; London, Wallace Collection), he continued to use Arab cultures as inspiration for scenes from Hebrew scriptures. He even went so far as to present his theory formally to the Academy in 1847.

Reading Vernet’s 1847 account of the development of his idea highlights the differences between his and Delacroix’s experiences in North Africa and their subsequent paintings. In Vernet’s explanation of his theory, his 1833 visit to Algeria provided the critical moment of inspiration, and he specifically invokes the scene he depicts in Rebecca and Eliezer: “The first revelation was made to me in Algeria, one day while on expedition against certain tribes of the Bône region. I was in the back of my tent reading the subject of Rebecca at the fountain, carrying her pitcher on her left shoulder, and letting it slide down her right arm to give a drink to Eliezer. This movement seemed to me rather difficult to understand; I raised my eyes, and what did I see? . . . a young woman giving a drink to a soldier and reproducing exactly the act that I was trying to comprehend.”⁸⁶ Vernet uses the language of divine communication (the “revelation was made to me”) to justify his claim that the gesture he saw in Algeria replicated perfectly the actions he read about in his Bible. More important, Vernet discloses that he was with the French army, which was attacking villages near Bône in an effort to secure French control of the area.

Yet in Rebecca and Eliezer, the French soldier is transformed into an Algerian Arab masquerading as Eliezer, and the French army and their tents have vanished from the landscape, to be replaced by several tranquil camels and a serene vista. In contrast to Vernet, Delacroix accompanied a diplomatic delegation to independent Morocco. While his paintings do not seek to reproduce the facts of that mission, they represent Moroccan Arabs as Moroccan Arabs rather than transforming them into figures from Judeo-Christian literature. This difference is critical: in Vernet’s comparison, Muslim Algerian Arabs help French viewers better imagine the biblical past and nothing more. In Delacroix’s, the classical model facilitates a better understanding of Moroccan Arabs and demonstrates their possession of prized characteristics of French masculinity. To put it another way, Vernet saw Arabs as a vehicle for understanding ancient civilizations, but Delacroix saw ancient civilizations as a means of articulating the independence and autonomy of Moroccans.

In his writings and images of Moroccan men, Delacroix used an analogy with the classical world in order to communicate his vision of their self-possessed dignity, aesthetic beauty, and autonomy in both sex and politics. He was inspired, in part, by his desire to wrest the classical from the grip of the neoclassicists and put it into the service of more modern subject matter, namely the culture of contemporary Morocco, but he never allowed his figures to devolve into mannequins empty of virtue. Delacroix’s interpretation diverges fundamentally from both the views of his colleague Vernet and those of the French government, which sought to co-opt the classical model for its own ends. Our close examination of his drawings, paintings, and writings reveals that Delacroix’s position shows little evidence of a will to colonial domination. Indeed, his claim that Moroccan men resemble ancient Roman heroes, like Cato and Brutus, has a politicized subtext: independence from outside forces helped Moroccans remain dignified and powerful.

Delacroix’s belief that Moroccan culture shared much in common with classical antiquity was not limited to white-robed men with stately bearing: he also saw classical qualities in Morocco’s military culture. In a note written on February 4, 1832, he recounted that in Morocco, just as in ancient Rome, citizens were viewed as either soldiers or noncombatants: “Incinctus, people who are not warriors. Cinctus or accinctus, military men. This distinction that existed among the Ancients is found here!”⁸⁷ Later, in his 1843 manuscript, he made note of “the soldiers on horseback resembling Roman soldiers.”⁸⁸ Although enthusiastic about their similarities to the classical world, Delacroix admired Moroccan soldiers for the more dynamic aspect of masculinity they revealed, a manliness that was ardent yet self-disciplined. His engagement with the valor and expressive energy of the Moroccan cavalry is the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 3 Men on Horseback Military Heroes of the Maghreb

In a meditation on his experiences in Morocco in 1832, Delacroix revealed that riding a horse through the countryside had an invigorating effect on his sense of his own masculinity: “In the midst of these vast plains filled with flowers and herbs that released their scent beneath the feet of our horses, one feels like another being, one is a man.”¹ The sensory pleasures of being outdoors on horseback transformed him into “another being,” a man. To hear Delacroix tell it, this activity imbued him with a feeling of manliness that he failed to notice otherwise. When Delacroix wrote these telling phrases, his Moroccan sojourn was more than a decade in the past. During the intervening eleven years, he had dedicated a series of paintings to the theme of Moroccan men on horseback (see fig. 1). In fact, this subject was the first he addressed when he began producing pictures based on his experiences in North Africa.² His interest in this motif and his identification with its manly qualities indicate that for Delacroix, Moroccan equestrians embodied a powerful exemplar of masculinity, suitable both for personal emulation and for painting.

Although Delacroix’s statements about the revitalizing effects of horsemanship were not discovered until 1997, his interest in Moroccan horsemen has long been evident in his many paintings and drawings on the theme. Despite this clear pictorial concern, Delacroix’s paintings of Moroccan men on horseback have frequently been judged as theatrical flights of imagination with little grounding in reality. As early as 1876, Théophile Silvestre described them as “fantastical visions” of “fabulous excess.”³ Even as late as 2001, Grigsby argued that they perpetrate a stereotype of Arab violence because they depict Moroccan men engaging in what she sees as “purposeless, undirected aggression.”⁴ Such characterizations are part of a broader tendency to see French paintings of Arab equestrians as what Christine Peltre calls “images of a wild horsemanship” that reinforce a biased belief in the “cruel, passionate Orient.”⁵ The trouble with these assessments is that they direct critical attention away from the ways in which Delacroix’s paintings emphasize historically and culturally specific qualities of masculine virtuosity and military excellence that speak to the pictorial language of traditional history painting. O’Brien’s proposal that Delacroix used Moroccan imagery to critique modernity offers much-needed historical grounding to the art-historical account of these pictures.⁶ But in order to fully understand these innovative images, we must also acknowledge and examine Delacroix’s deep personal and artistic engagement with the values incarnate in Moroccan military horsemanship.

Rather than being fantastical embodiments of Arab rage or picturesque but exotic Others, the Moroccan men in Delacroix’s equestrian pictures are members of the Royal Cavalry who are practicing military maneuvers. Thanks to Delacroix’s letters, we have long possessed evidence that these paintings focus on the Moroccan cavalry, but the significance of this choice of subject matter has not yet been closely examined.⁷ When Delacroix visited Morocco in 1832, he had many opportunities to observe these soldiers and their horsemanship. At Sultan Abd er-Rahman’s order, a large detachment of the Royal Cavalry escorted the French diplomatic delegation on their journeys from Tangier to Meknes and back.⁸ During these weeks of travel, Delacroix spent many hours studying the cavalry (fig. 36). When he later translated his observations into paintings, he celebrated the strength and energy of Moroccan soldiers and their steeds. Examining these pictures in the context of Moroccan military culture and French constructions of manliness reveals that Delacroix envisioned Moroccan cavalrymen as models of heroic masculinity suitable for history painting and created images that contrasted sharply with the patronizing Orientalism of his peers.

fig. 36 | Eugène Delacroix, Sketches from the Trip from Meknes to Tangier, April 11, 1832. Ink and watercolor, each page 19.3 × 12.7 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Album RF 1712bis, fol. 31v–32r. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

Manlier Men: The Moroccan Cavalry

Far from characterizing his paintings of Moroccan men on horseback as works of fantasy or unbridled imagination, Delacroix himself illuminated the crucial fact that they depict activities that are explicitly military in nature. In a letter written in 1839, the artist describes Collision of Arab Horsemen (1833–34) as an image of an episode he witnessed during “Moroccan military maneuvers, which consist of [men] launching their horses at top speed and stopping them suddenly after having fired their rifles” (fig. 37).⁹ Eight years later, he discusses these movements in greater detail in the explanatory text for Moroccan Military Exercises (now called Arab Cavalry Practicing a Charge) that he provided for the catalogue for the Salon of 1847: “Riders, often in considerable numbers, start all at once while shouting and waving their weapons. . . . At the end of the trajectory, each rider fires his rifle while stopping his mount short to go [back] to reload. . . . This is called courir la poudre” (see fig. 71).¹⁰ The exercise Delacroix describes here was more commonly known as a course de poudre (literally, a gunpowder race).¹¹ This phrase is an awkward French translation of the Arabic term laab el-barod and was abandoned in the mid-nineteenth century for the more dramatic term fantasia (used in English, French, and German). I will not use that word here, for though Pierre Larousse himself attributes it to Delacroix and many have since followed his example, there is no evidence that the artist ever used it to designate scenes of the courses de poudre.¹² The term fantasia is also problematic because it obscures the martial origins of the courses, as I shall call them, and replaces their military function with an Orientalist fantasy, as it were, of picturesquely violent but ineffectual Arabs.

fig. 37 | Eugène Delacroix, Collision of Arab Horsemen, 1833–34. Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 101.6 cm. Private collection. Photo: Alex Jamison.

Delacroix’s characterization of the courses as military in nature is supported by the observations of an earlier visitor, Captain Antoine Burel. In 1808, Napoleon, eager to expand the boundaries of his empire, sent Burel to Morocco to evaluate the kingdom’s military power and to explore the potential for an eventual French invasion. Burel sent back a detailed secret report in which he comments closely on the Moroccan cavalry. Here, he describes the activities later painted by Delacroix:

The exercises of the cavalry consist of crossing at full gallop a space of two hundred gauges by troops of eight to ten riders who let out loud cries. In this trajectory they briefly raise their rifles to their heads, [and] holding them by the center of gravity with their arms outstretched, they then take aim, still with one hand, and, directing the rifles towards their adversary or the person they want to honor, they fire a shot at him at ten paces by pressing the trigger with the left hand without letting go of the reins. The shot fired, they stop short and ride back two hundred gauges to recharge their weapons.¹³

Burel’s account helps us interpret what is going on in Delacroix’s paintings. In both early versions of Moroccan Military Exercises, Delacroix included groups of four to five men galloping in formation while firing their rifles (figs. 1 and 38). Each rider extends one arm to shoot with a single hand while grasping the reins in the other.¹⁴

In his paintings of the courses, Delacroix emphasizes the energy, dexterity, and beauty manifested by the riders and their steeds. Both his paintings and his and Burel’s written descriptions make clear that these exercises required a tremendous amount of strength and agility, not to mention an absolute mastery of equestrian skills. In Delacroix’s early pictures of the courses, the horses’ pounding hooves rise above the ground as they gallop forward at such a pace that their bodies seem to be borne aloft. Fluttering drapery, windswept manes, and streaming tails create an almost physical sensation of speed. Clouds of gun smoke billowing above the heads of the riders and small sparks of fire bursting from the barrels of the rifles intensify the feeling of transience generated by swift movement. In the Montpellier version, a soldier in the right foreground keeps his seat and his rifle even as his horse rears sharply (fig. 38). When Delacroix took up the theme of the courses for the last time in 1847, he focused closely on the dynamism of the performance, creating what appears to twenty-first-century eyes to be an almost cinematic group (see fig. 71). The cavalry thunders past, moving quickly out of a picture frame that crops the body of one of the horses at the far left.

fig. 38 | Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Military Exercises, 1832. Oil on canvas, 60 × 73.2 cm. Musée Fabre, Montpellier. © Musée Fabre de Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole. Photo: Frédéric Jaulmes. Reproduction forbidden without authorization.

Although military pictures like these resonated with contemporary French concerns about masculinity, little sign of Delacroix’s enthusiastic appreciation for them can be found in his early years as a painter. As we saw in chapter 1, the Napoleonic soldier represented a powerful ideal of manliness during the Empire and even the Restoration. André Rauch argues that beginning in the Revolution of 1789 and reaching its apogee during World War I, military service came to be seen as “one of the principal traits of virility” for French men.¹⁵ Within the martial context, courage, strength, self-sacrifice, and loyalty to army and country were rewarded as a meritocratic hierarchy superseded the aristocratic one. From 1815 to 1830, however, political upheaval both within and outside France weakened the efficacy of this prototype. During this era, many men looked back to the imperial paradigm with regret for its loss, while others became critical of the military as a channel for the expression of heroic virility.¹⁶ Bonapartist artists like Horace Vernet did their utmost to preserve the Napoleonic model throughout the Restoration.¹⁷ Delacroix, however, eschewed this type of subject matter. Both French battle paintings he executed before 1832 were commissioned images of late medieval conflicts: The Battle of Poitiers (1830; Paris, Musée du Louvre) and The Battle of Nancy: Death of Charles the Bold (1831; Nancy, Musée des Beaux-arts). Although this pair of compositions was heavily influenced by Gros’s pictures, Delacroix diverged from his Napoleonic forebear by depicting protagonists who are tragically doomed.¹⁸ When he did take up the modern soldier in his early years, it was through the highly problematic Ottoman cavalryman in The Massacres of Chios (see fig. 4). A deeply ambivalent figure, Delacroix’s Turkish soldier exhibited important positive traits of manly strength and agency alongside depraved violence and sexual excess.¹⁹

While the French soldier regained some of his force as an emblem of masculinity during the July Monarchy, this model was as unappealing to Delacroix as its Napoleonic counterpart had been. The French soldier of the 1830s and 1840s was engaged, at home, in the unpopular repression of French civilians and, abroad, in the conquest of Algeria, where members of the so-called army of Africa (armée d’Afrique) fought against Arabs, Turks, and Kabyles. The French military used the armée d’Afrique as a dumping ground for volontaires (recruits) from the July Revolution who could not be rehabilitated elsewhere and for problem soldiers, including those with multiple disciplinary offenses and those convicted of crimes.²⁰ Once more, Delacroix chose not to paint these men, again in contrast to his peers. Vernet, for example, exalted the members of the armée d’Afrique in endless state-commissioned paintings of battles in Algeria (fig. 39). The critic Prosper Haussard called him “the standard painter of our soldiers” (le peintre ordinaire de nos soldats), but Vernet’s military oeuvre also glorifies Louis-Philippe’s sons.²¹ For Delacroix, skeptical as he was of the Algerian conquest, the French soldier of the July Monarchy held little appeal, but Moroccan soldiers stimulated his interest in an alternate model of military masculinity.²² Though the Franco-Moroccan relationship was a tense one, Morocco was not seen as an enemy of France during the 1830s.²³ Instead of joining in nationalistic visual reification of the controversial mission of the armée d’Afrique, Delacroix opted to paint members of a foreign army.

fig. 39 | Horace Vernet, The Siege of Constantine: Capture of the City, October 13, 1837, 1839. Oil on canvas, 512 × 518 cm. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

In contrast to his lack of interest in French soldiers, Delacroix seems to have seen Moroccan cavalrymen as possessing a unique vigor that made them singularly admirable. In the manuscript he drafted in the early 1840s as part of a memoir of his travels, he reflects that Moroccan men possessed traits both “horrible and admirable” to him. Elaborating on this observation, he explains, “I found there men [who are] more men than we are” (Je trouvais là des hommes plus hommes que nous).²⁴ In other words, Delacroix saw Moroccan men as both more masculine and arguably more human than their French brothers. While he interpreted the “horrible” qualities as typical corruptions of advanced civilizations, he respected the sincerity and energy of the “admirable” ones. For Delacroix, this pure vitality derived, at least in part, from the Moroccan climate and landscape, where riding his horse across the plains made him feel like a man. As we saw in chapter 2, he credited exposure to the natural world with fostering the manliness he saw in Morocco: “Man is not made to be closed up in dwellings of stone and plaster. He needs the free pure air of the fields or the deserts. Imprisoned, he becomes unnatural and withered.”²⁵ Because Moroccan men spent so much time outdoors, they were free from this shriveling, diminishing effect, one that Parisians like Delacroix could not avoid. If living in the city created impotence and weakness, spending time in the countryside reinvigorated one’s sense of manliness.²⁶ By virtue of their profession, the Moroccan cavalry had ready access to fields and deserts and could therefore avoid the enervating consequences of urban life.

In addition to exposing Moroccan soldiers to the bracing influence of the outdoors, the courses both refined and showcased their power, skill, and courage as horsemen. One rider particularly impressed Delacroix after his horse fell and rolled over him. Although he was “picked up half dead,” the man “got back on his horse an instant later.”²⁷ On the military level, the movements of the courses were designed to strengthen a style of fighting that relied on speed and agility, so that riders could dart in and out of battle like stinging wasps.²⁸ It also facilitated the use of small, devastating ambushes. These approaches to warfare, also shared by Algerians and Mamluks, contrasted sharply with the methods used by the French cavalry before they encountered North African fighting styles. The French relied on larger troops of horsemen that moved at a comparatively slow pace. While the French would eventually reap the benefits of a more effective military bureaucracy and better weaponry, they were at a strategic disadvantage in Algeria until they adopted some of the battle techniques of their adversaries.

Beyond their function as martial exercises, the courses were often adapted to play important symbolic roles, a practice that would later supersede their military function.²⁹ As Burel notes in his 1808 report, the courses served a ceremonial purpose at certain times. In 1832, for example, the French delegation received the courtesy of at least a half-dozen performances of the maneuvers, especially upon their arrival in Meknes (fig. 40).³⁰ The practice possessed a second, more politically charged valence when executed in front of foreign spectators. When Delacroix visited in 1832, the French army was intensely engaged in expanding its 1830 conquest beyond the city of Algiers.³¹ Sultan Abd er-Rahman was naturally concerned about the scope of French ambitions in North Africa. He expressed deep dismay over the fall of Algiers and the subsequent toppling from power of Hussein Dey, the regent of the kingdom of Algeria. Indeed, in 1830, Abd er-Rahman described the fate of Algiers as a “disastrous calamity” for the Maghreb as a whole.³² As Amira Bennison demonstrates, the sultan saw the 1832 Meknes trip as an opportunity to show off the martial capabilities of the Moroccan military to the French delegation.³³ Thus Abd er-Rahman’s insistence on repeated performances of the courses reflected his desire to vaunt the power of the Moroccan Royal Cavalry as much as to observe protocol. As their correspondence reveals, the French delegation certainly responded to the courses with uneasiness.

fig. 40 | Eugène Delacroix, The Arrival in Meknes, March 15, 1832. Graphite and watercolor, each page 19.3 × 12.7 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Album RF 1712bis, fol. 17v–18r. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

Despite the fact that he later depicted the courses in heroic terms, Delacroix initially spoke of them in an ironic tone. Before seeing his first performance, he characterized the exercise mockingly: “The Emperor . . . is to receive us with all sorts of Moorish politesses, gunshots, horse races, etc., etc.”³⁴ Later in his sojourn, after witnessing the official reception and several more episodes of the courses, irritation and fear began to inflect his sardonic humor (fig. 41). Describing to friends back in Paris the many courses he saw on the trip from Tangier to Meknes, he writes, “At every instance we met new armed tribes who expended a terrifying amount of gunpowder to celebrate our arrival.”³⁵ In another letter, Delacroix recounts his negative response to the reception at Meknes: “[The music] creates an extremely deafening racket that blends with the gunfire of the cavalry and the infantry and the most fanatical who were breaking through [the crowd] all around us to shoot in our faces. All of this filled us with wrath and a feeling of absurdity that I remember now with less temper.”³⁶

fig. 41 | Eugène Delacroix, Course de Poudre Outside Meknes, 1832. Graphite and watercolor, 15 × 27 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

When writing to friends back in France, Delacroix represented the courses as a disorderly and faintly ridiculous ritual, but his tone likely masked genuine anxiety. In his letters, he largely glosses over the fact that the courses occasionally became dangerous for spectators as well as participants. One notable incident occurred on the trip to Meknes, when a man shot at one of the members of the French mission during the courses that were performed as the delegation approached the city of Ksar el-Kebir in the province of Larache. In his Meknes sketchbook, Delacroix describes the event: “A man broke through the crowd of soldiers and came and shot in our faces. He was seized by Abou [ben Abd el-Malek, the commander of the Royal Cavalry]. His fury. By the unwrapped turban they dragged him, they laid him down further away. My terror. We ran. The saber was already drawn.”³⁷ Despite his fears about the outcome, Delacroix does not mention the man’s fate in his notes. Mornay, on the other hand, is more forthcoming in his official correspondence with Horace Sébastiani, the French minister of foreign affairs. He reveals that he intervened to prevent a summary execution of the offender: “In arriving at the city of Kassar-el-Gibir [sic], one of the unfortunates who was performing the gunpowder races had the imprudence to throw himself into the middle of the horses of my escort in order to have the wretched satisfaction of firing a shot at me point-blank. The pasha [of Larache] had him arrested and ordered that his head be cut off that very instant. I had just enough time to run to request his pardon, which was accorded to me.”³⁸ Mornay’s concern for the fate of the would-be assassin overshadowed the fact that the situation was actually fairly threatening to his own safety. In fact, Mornay’s intercession may have had little effect on the outcome: though the man escaped decapitation, it is not clear whether he survived the subsequent flogging.³⁹ From the Moroccan standpoint, however, the rapid response of the commander of the Royal Cavalry and the pasha of Larache helped minimize what could have become a difficult diplomatic incident. Their actions also set an example for any other prospective attackers.⁴⁰

Mornay’s reports about the courses seem to conflate the Moroccan Royal Cavalry with the local men who participated in the official receptions. In the same report to Sébastiani, he complains, “These marks of consideration are not without danger for the Christians who receive them, for the Moors enjoy firing in their faces to see if they will succumb to fear.”⁴¹ Unlike Burel, who interprets this type of gunfire as a mark of respect, Mornay sees it as a sign of aggression: “The marks of enmity demonstrated to me many times by most of the fanatics of this country enabled me to remark that this escort—so numerous, and which seemed superfluous at the time of departure—was hardly sufficient to contain this multitude and that the order given by the Emperor [Sultan Abd er-Rahman] to the different pashas whose provinces I crossed to treat me honorably and to make me respected had been carried out in every detail.”⁴² Mornay’s account plainly illustrates his perception that the French encountered a high level of hostility on their way to Meknes and his relief at having a large detachment of Moroccan soldiers to protect them.

The alarm expressed by Mornay and, to a lesser extent, Delacroix was not a simple case of European fear of the Arab Other: the French experience was heavily engineered by the sultan and his administration. As Bennison argues, the large crowds that greeted the French delegation outside every city on the way to Meknes were ordered to attend by Abd er-Rahman’s administration, which thereby created what she characterizes as “a more controlled outlet for popular hostility to the French and a tableau in which the French actors were disempowered by their need for sultanic protection and approached him as supplicants.”⁴³ In so doing, the sultan skillfully placated the Moroccan factions that favored war with France after its invasion of Algeria while simultaneously impressing upon the French their position of relative weakness. Bennison describes the trip to Meknes and its ceremonies as a “theatrical enterprise” staged by Abd er-Rahman.⁴⁴ The performance of the courses in this context served not only to greet the delegation and show off Moroccan military strength but also to remind the crowds of the authority of the sultan himself, as embodied in his cavalry. Abd er-Rahman’s role in mediating Delacroix’s experience in Morocco can be understood as something akin to what Pratt calls “transculturation,” or the process by which the colonized present themselves selectively to the colonizer.⁴⁵ While Morocco was by no means a colony, the idea of selective self-presentation is evident here. Abd er-Rahman’s careful orchestration of the events on the trip to Meknes reveals that while the enmity perceived by the French was indeed genuine, it was channeled and magnified by the sultan to further strengthen his position in the negotiations that would take place at Meknes.

fig. 42 | Eugène Delacroix, Studies of the Moroccan Cavalry, April 11, 1832. Watercolor, pen, and ink, 19.3 × 12.7 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Album RF 1712bis, fol. 31r. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

fig. 43 | Eugène Delacroix, Studies of Arabs on Horseback, March 11, 1832. Graphite and watercolor, 15.5 × 21.6 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Photo courtesy of the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

fig. 44 | Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Saddle, 1832. Black ink and watercolor, 10 × 16.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Album RF 39050, fol. 52v. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

These historical details are also important because they demonstrate that the Franco-Moroccan relationship was not a simplistic matter of “Occident” versus “Orient” or imperialist versus subaltern. Instead, it consisted of a complex web of interactions that were driven by a range of motives and competing demands. To a large extent, Sultan Abd er-Rahman shaped Delacroix’s experiences of the courses and thereby, we could argue, his later imagery. The protective role of the Moroccan Royal Cavalry in the drama of the trip to Meknes also suggests that Delacroix’s ultimately positive response to them was influenced by the security they offered the French group. And if Delacroix implied in his letters that he did not take the courses seriously, his drawings from the trip suggest otherwise. Throughout the journeys to and from Meknes, he sketched assiduously, noting details of dress, equestrian gear, and riding position (figs. 42, 43, and 44). Later, freed from the constraints of time and travel in front of the canvases in his Paris studio, he focused on what was essential to him: the heroic aspects of the courses. The Moroccan soldier required physical strength and courage, tremendous dexterity, and complete mastery of his horse—three important components of military and aristocratic models of masculinity in nineteenth-century France that we shall explore further. For Delacroix personally, the Moroccan cavalryman’s frequent exposure to the invigorating effects of the outdoors was something he later described as a key aspect of his own manliness, one that had buttressed his sense of his own virility: “In the midst of these vast plains . . . , one feels like another being, one is a man.”⁴⁶

Masculinity and the Moroccan Horse

Delacroix’s impression of the Moroccan cavalry’s manliness derived in part from their steeds. In fact, Delacroix’s admiration for Moroccan horses probably fueled his interest in the men who rode them. As we saw in chapter 1, the artist’s engagement with horses dated to the early 1820s and was part of a larger cultural mania for the equine in which the horse played a central role in male sociability and masculine identity. The ability to ride a horse, and to ride it well, was crucial. Those who could afford it took lessons with riding masters, as Delacroix did during his trip to England in 1825.⁴⁷ Others might consult instruction books about proper form, such as Amand-Denis Vergnaud’s 1834 Manual of Horsemanship for the Use of Both Sexes.⁴⁸ Knowledge of breeds and equine health was also valuable, because it could better inform the purchase of an animal. Organized public horse racing, absent since the eighteenth century, had reappeared in 1819, quickly becoming more widespread and popular than ever before. The Journal des haras (Stud farm journal), a biweekly periodical devoted to all things equine, began publishing in 1828, and the famous, horse-obsessed Jockey-Club de Paris opened its doors in 1834.⁴⁹

The trip to Morocco enabled Delacroix to see one of the most renowned breeds of horse in the flesh. In his 1853 biography of the artist, Silvestre quotes Delacroix as saying that “the study of Arab horses” was one of the two greatest pleasures of his sojourn in Morocco.⁵⁰ Delacroix probably saw barbs (a North African breed) rather than Arabs, but the two breeds are closely related. Although the barb was still uncommon in France, the Arab horse was prized by French breeders, aficionados, and military men for its speed, slenderness, and agility.⁵¹ While Delacroix appreciated the animals for different reasons, he was nevertheless much taken with them. During his visit to Morocco, the artist filled many pages with sketches of horses and their gear (figs. 42 and 44). Such was his fascination with the beasts that the motif of men on horseback was the first Moroccan theme he tackled in oil paint. Arab Horseman Practicing a Charge (Paris, private collection), one of two paintings that Delacroix is thought to have executed while still in Morocco, focuses on the courses, depicting a lone cavalry soldier who fires his rifle mid-gallop through a Moroccan plain.⁵² Delacroix gave this painting to Jacques-Denis Delaporte, the acting French consul at Tangier, who shared his passion for horses. This small picture is an artifact of masculine friendship that both served as a memento of their time together and reflected their mutual interest in horses.

Although many Frenchmen valued Arab and barb horses for their physical characteristics, Delacroix emphasizes the sensibility of the beasts in his paintings, and his pictorial attribution of intelligence and feeling to Moroccan horses not only redefines their animality but also elucidates the skill exhibited by the cavalrymen. In the picture he gave Delaporte in 1832, for example, the horse wrinkles its brow in a nearly human expression of concentration and possibly distress. Similarly, in the earliest version of Moroccan Military Exercises, Delacroix endows the animals with extremely large eyes that are tinged with red (see fig. 38). These oversized orbs communicate the intensity of the beasts’ engagement in the courses. Each horse carries its head in a different position, creating an impression of fervent individuality. In contrast to their mounts, the men seem calm and tightly contained as they tense their bodies, directing their energy to firing their rifles in unison. Even the troop leader retains an air of composure as he battles for control of his rearing, wild-eyed steed, which paws at the air and shakes its head violently. A third picture, Arab Soldier by a Grave (1838), shows Delacroix’s interest in a quieter form of equine feeling (fig. 45). Here, an Arab man and his horse pause among a small cluster of graves, each marked with a rectangle of stones. The man sits before one of these, while, behind him, his horse leans down, approaching its master tentatively and arching its neck expressively. Lowering its gorgeously harnessed head, the steed seems to join the man in meditative, even prayerful contemplation.⁵³ In addition to displaying its emotional intelligence, the animal’s attitude in this particular scene hints at an affective symbiosis between man and beast.

fig. 45 | Eugène Delacroix, Arab by a Grave, 1838. Oil on canvas, 47.3 × 56 cm. Hiroshima Museum of Art. Photo: Hiroshima Museum of Art.

In certain respects these pictures echo the common French belief that Arab and barb horses were more psychologically engaged with humans than were their European counterparts. Forbin, the powerful arts administrator whom Delacroix knew, had praised the expressivity of the Arab horse he rode through the desert during his 1819 visit to Ottoman-controlled Syria. As noted in chapter 1, he was particularly impressed by the beast’s “sweetness” and affectionate, sociable behavior.⁵⁴ Writing in 1835 about a trip to North Africa, the poet and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine observes, “Among the Arabs, the master’s horse is always there too, wearing his magnificent harness, ready to be mounted; he is totally part of the family, and seems to take an interest in all that goes on, in all that is said around him; his physiognomy becomes animated like that of a human face.”⁵⁵ Lamartine and others saw these qualities as evidence of the superiority of equine culture and breeding in the Arab world.⁵⁶ More generally, French interest in equine feeling owed something to what Kari Weil shows to be a growing belief in the nineteenth century that animals are sentient beings that deserve humane treatment rather than Cartesian machines that can be abused freely, as demonstrated by Eugène Sue’s 1838 novella The Godolphin Arabian.⁵⁷ As Daniel Roche argues, this tale contrasts Arab compassion and care for animals with French indifference and brutality.⁵⁸ Even before visiting North Africa, Delacroix had explored the notion of animal intelligence in some of his images of Turks and their horses from the 1820s, like the charming Young Turk Stroking His Horse, discussed in chapter 1 (see fig. 12). Indeed, the pose of the beast in Arab Soldier by a Grave echoes that of the Arab horse in Carle Vernet’s 1819 Mamluk and His Horse (see fig. 14). The attentive concern Delacroix attributed to the steed in Arab Soldier by a Grave arises in part from broader French beliefs about the sensitivity of Arab horses.

In his representations of Moroccan soldiers and their horses, however, Delacroix often favored violent equine emotions over tranquil ones. In an 1832 letter from Tangier, he claims that even “the gentlest [horses] are all devils,” a rhetorical exaggeration that speaks to his own preference.⁵⁹ Later, his description of Moroccan Military Exercises (also called Arab Cavalry Practicing a Charge for the 1847 Salon catalogue illustrates his continued preoccupation with the high temper of barbs (see fig. 71). Here, he notes that the riders “are usually served marvelously by the ardor and emulation of their horses. Sometimes the capriciousness of the latter gives rise to accidents.” For the soldiers, he continues, the maneuver of firing and then stopping their mounts short “is not without disadvantage, thanks to the irregularities of the terrain and the impetuosity of the horses, which are very difficult to contain brusquely despite the violence of the bit.”⁶⁰ Delacroix’s dramatic characterization of the beasts’ role in the courses points to the artist’s taste for equine theatricality and heightens, by extension, the skill of the men who ride them.

To accommodate his partiality for strong feeling in horses, Delacroix occasionally altered the narrative basis of his pictures. The vivid Collision of Arab Horsemen, painted in two highly similar versions at different times, evolved from a relatively tame incident Delacroix saw during a course on the trip to Meknes from Tangier (see fig. 37).⁶¹ On March 6, 1832, he noted the event briefly in his Meknes sketchbook: “Courses de poudre in the plain in front of the river. The two men who collided. The one whose horse’s ass touched the ground.”⁶² In the paintings, the hindquarters of both horses hover just above the grass beneath them, but only their tails brush the earth. Although the March 6 accident inspired the paintings, Delacroix later described the subject in terms that create a much more exciting scenario. In 1847, he claimed that in Morocco, “The horses often carry off their riders and fight each other when they meet. This is the situation of the two main figures of this painting.”⁶³ While the encounter between the two animals looks more like a collision than an attack, Delacroix’s revision makes the painting more dramatic and further accentuates the fiery spirit of Moroccan horses. In fact, Delacroix seems far more interested in their emotional excess than in their ability to communicate and interact with humans.

The artist’s lifelong fascination with horse fights attests to his belief in the excitable nature of the animals. While in Morocco, he was especially struck by an equine battle that he witnessed during a ride in the countryside near Tangier, the same incident that inspired his comment that barbs were “devils.” Delacroix had ridden out with Mornay, Edward Drummond Hay (the English consul), and their grooms and bodyguards. They were enjoying a pleasant ramble when the steeds of Mornay and Drummond Hay suddenly took exception to one another. Shrieking with hatred, the two horses attacked each other, biting, rearing, and kicking. So great was their passion that they fell into a nearby stream, where they continued to fight. The struggle finally ended when one animal retreated to the far bank of the stream, allowing the grooms to seize the other. Later that evening, in his sketchbook, Delacroix recounted the incident and his response to it: “First they reared up and fought with a furious energy that made me tremble for these gentlemen [(their riders)] but [was] truly admirable for painting. I saw there, I’m sure of it, everything that Gros and Rubens could have imagined of the most fantastic and the most agile.”⁶⁴ Though alarmed by the physical danger in which the fight put Mornay and Drummond Hay, Delacroix was entranced by the pictorial possibilities offered by the horses’ rage. His belief in the passionate temperament of barb horses provided him with good material for painting, not only in his images of the courses from the 1830s and 1840s but also in the 1860 Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable, which we will examine in chapter 5 (see fig. 76). Delacroix’s fascination with the dramatic personalities of barbs also intensified his interest in the Moroccan cavalry. Men who could manage such fiery steeds must also, for Delacroix, have possessed a purer, more physically courageous masculinity than the majority of their French counterparts.

Abd el-Malek and the Chivalric Ideal

The man who, more than any other, embodied the virtues of Delacroix’s new model of military, equestrian masculinity was Mohammed ben Abou ben Abd el-Malek, the commander of the Moroccan Royal Cavalry, known to his friends and associates as Ben Abou (fig. 46). During the trips to and from Meknes, Abd el-Malek led the large cavalry detachment that escorted the French delegation. In his paintings of the 1830s and in his notes for his memoir in the 1840s, Delacroix made Abd el-Malek an important figure. These textual and pictorial representations reveal his admiration for the commander, whose humility, equestrian skill, and authoritative leadership impressed the French artist deeply. These characteristics eventually led Delacroix to view Abd el-Malek as a modern ideal of chivalry.

fig. 46 | Eugène Delacroix, Mohammed ben Abou ben Abd el-Malek, ca. 1832–33. Graphite and watercolor, 15.4 × 20.7 cm. Private collection. © de Bayser.

During the journey to Meknes, Delacroix interacted socially with the commander and observed him closely. Born the same year as Delacroix, Abd el-Malek came from a prominent Tangerine family. By 1832, through a combination of circumstance and skill, he had risen to the highest ranks of the Moroccan Royal Cavalry. Later in his life, Abd el-Malek became well known for his friendliness to Europeans. In the 1840s and 1850s, both the French and the English vied for his favor and promoted his interests. John Drummond Hay, who succeeded his father as English consul at Tangier, described Abd el-Malek as a personal friend.⁶⁵ During the journeys to and from Meknes in 1832, Abd el-Malek and Delacroix dined, took tea, and listened to music together in the evenings. Although they were obliged to communicate through an interpreter, the two men conversed about horses, a common interest as well as a key element of masculine identity in both French and Moroccan cultures.⁶⁶ It is telling that the only true portrait of Abd el-Malek from the trip appears alongside several studies of a man on horseback (fig. 47).⁶⁷ That man, clad in purple, is probably the brother of the pasha of Larache. A drawing of Abd el-Malek’s face appears in graphite at the bottom right of the sketch, next to the inscription “Abou.”

fig. 47 | Eugène Delacroix, Seven Sketches of Arabs, March 8, 1832. Graphite and watercolor, 15.5 × 21.3 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Photo: Cecilia Heisser / Nationalmuseum.

Delacroix later created a portrait of Abd el-Malek for the album of watercolors he made for Mornay (see fig. 46); he subsequently copied it in pencil to make an etching that was released in 1833.⁶⁸ In this image, Delacroix depicts the commander indoors, presumably at his home in Tangier. Kneeling comfortably on a multicolored carpet, Abd el-Malek wears an elegant sky-blue djellaba with a white burnous pushed back over his shoulders and wrapped around one knee. His skin is a deep, rich brown, much darker than the skin of other Arabs Delacroix painted in the Mornay watercolors. It is tempting to imagine that Delacroix deepened Abd el-Malek’s complexion to refer to the amount of time he spent on horseback or to accentuate his racial difference, but a French account of the commander from 1856 noted his “dark brown complexion” (teint brun foncé).⁶⁹ The room is adorned with numerous accessories: two small chests, the pelt of a wildcat, a collection of weapons dangling from the ceiling, and a wooden cabinet built into the wall. A teapot and small bowl rest on a low table beside Abd el-Malek.⁷⁰ The circular cushion at the right of the watercolor would later reappear in the background of Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834; Paris, Musée du Louvre). Delacroix’s decision to represent the commander at home, rather than on horseback or in a tent, suggests that he wanted to show that he and Mornay had been received as guests in the home of this powerful, high-status man.

While Delacroix would later wax poetic about Abd el-Malek’s courage and skill as a horseman, his writings from 1832 emphasize the commander’s rigorous leadership. On several occasions, Delacroix noted Abd el-Malek’s review of the troops and use of the space in front of his tent as the site for evening prayer, both of which were key disciplinary practices for an army that Sultan Abd er-Rahman was trying to reform.⁷¹ Describing in 1832 the episode when Mornay was fired upon outside of Ksar el-Kebir, Delacroix recalled the way Abd el-Malek displayed “fury” at the would-be assassin. As we have seen, the strict punishment of this man sent a strong message to the assembled crowd about the consequences of attempted murder. During that same journey, Delacroix also paid special attention to an incident when Abd el-Malek disciplined his soldiers after a cavalryman tore his burnous. The artist reports that once they arrived at the next encampment, the commander “tore his coat into pieces, preferring to burn it rather than allowing anyone to benefit from it. Someone also broke his pipe. He was furious and inflexible towards the soldiers.”⁷² In this case, Delacroix seemed to have mistaken as temper Abd el-Malek’s correction of his troops, an important part of the role of a military leader. If the artist was taken aback by such actions at first, he was ultimately impressed by the commander’s passion and moral rigor with his soldiers.

While Delacroix appeared in 1832 to be most forcibly struck by Abd el-Malek’s authoritative leadership, he noted a gentler side of the commander’s personality as well. When they reached the outskirts of Tangier on their return trip to Meknes, for example, Delacroix observed that children came to greet Abd el-Malek, who asked them questions and then distributed coins. During the trips to and from Meknes, rural villagers greeted the commander by kissing his knee in a gesture of respect and brought him ceremonial basins of milk.⁷³ Despite this pomp, Abd el-Malek did not become pretentious. In Delacroix’s 1832 notes, he comments on this quality after encountering Abd el-Malek in Tangier several weeks after the trip to Meknes: “Abou, the general who led us, was seated the other day on the very step of the door [next to the boy who worked in the kitchen]. He did nothing but lean a little to the side to let us pass. There is something republican in this informality. The grands of the place go sit in a corner of the street crouched in the sun and chat together, or perch in some merchant’s shop.”⁷⁴ Abd el-Malek thought nothing of sitting on a stoop next to a servant, nor did he make any effort to effect a formal greeting. To Delacroix, this apparent nonchalance about social distinction seemed democratic. His response indicates that there was a significant gap between the commander’s behavior and Delacroix’s own expectations, which were informed by the seemingly more rigid social stratifications of July Monarchy France.

When Delacroix composed notes for his memoir around 1843, he emphasized Abd el-Malek’s humanity and military virtues, comparing him to a medieval knight. In one group of notes, he strings together a rich and highly evocative series of associations: “The beauty of Ben Abou in the courses. The horses taking off like thunder. Gives an idea of chivalry. Overturns all our modern ideas of a warrior. The general chez nous has the calmest comportment, a small sword he never draws. Where is Tancredi, Rinaldo?”⁷⁵ With the help of the softening lens of memory, Delacroix recalls the courses here as events of beauty and valor rather than the chaotic, sometimes dangerous undertakings he describes in his 1832 letters. In this vision of the courses, Abd el-Malek implicitly embodies the virtues of the Crusader heroes immortalized by Torquato Tasso, Ludovico Ariosto, and, of course, Gioachino Rossini.⁷⁶ Delacroix stresses this point again in the same notes, when he remarks that Abd el-Malek “absolutely called to mind, by his bearing and his habits, what one imagines of the former Moorish knights, conquerors of Spain.”⁷⁷ Through his participation in the dramatic military exercises, the Moroccan commander helped Delacroix better envision chivalry, a European model of masculinity from an age long past. Indeed, here Delacroix contrasts Abd el-Malek’s comportment with that of modern French generals. In Delacroix’s construction, the highly ranked French officer remains detached from the action of battle, unlike his Moroccan counterpart, who enters the fray with little concern for his own safety. Abd el-Malek was by Delacroix’s estimation a “brilliant warrior . . . who was always the most passionate one in the courses, and the most tireless.”⁷⁸ For the artist, Abd el-Malek’s courage, ardor, and skilled horsemanship made him a paradigm of heroic masculinity.

If Delacroix praised Abd el-Malek’s strengths as a man of action and feeling in 1832 and 1843, he was both puzzled and impressed by what he perceived as the commander’s occasional passivity and lack of self-consequence. When speaking of the kaid (commander or local governor) as a “brilliant warrior,” for example, Delacroix contrasts this role with his “listless attitude on his peaceable mule.”⁷⁹ When not performing courses de poudre or greeting local populations, the commander often rode this more modest animal rather than a horse. Delacroix was flabbergasted by this preference: “What general of ours wouldn’t blush to be seen on a mule?”⁸⁰ In his paintings of Abd el-Malek, Delacroix never showed him with such a creature, choosing instead the nobler horse as a companion for his idol. While unusual to the artist, the commander’s taste attested to his seeming lack of pretension.

Delacroix’s paintings reveal that his positive view of Abd el-Malek provided him with material for heroic imagery. In the early paintings of the courses, for example, we can imagine that the man on the rearing horse depicts the kaid (see fig. 38). Delacroix’s most important picture of Abd el-Malek, however, extolls his leadership. Exhibited at the Salon of 1838, Moroccan Chieftain Receiving Tribute depicts the inhabitants of Ksar el-Kebir welcoming the commander as he rides into their city (fig. 48).⁸¹ Leading a group of cavalrymen, Abd el-Malek extends his right hand toward a basin held by a woman who forms part of a small cluster of people who have gathered to greet the troop. The scene takes place on a plateau overlooking a lush green river valley framed by distant mountains. The subject of this picture has its roots in a specific event, one to which Delacroix referred twice in his sketchbooks from the 1832 trip.⁸² As the French delegation and its escort returned from Meknes to Tangier in April 1832, they passed anew through Ksar el-Kebir. This time, they received a tranquil greeting from the populace that differed sharply from the energetic welcome performances and sometimes hostile gunfire that marked their March 9 passage. In his sketchbook, Delacroix noted the incident, which began when the cavalry was met by a group of women: “The milk offered by the women. A stick with a white handkerchief. First the milk to the flag-bearers who each dipped a fingertip. Then to the kaid and the soldiers.”⁸³

fig. 48 | Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Chieftain Receiving Tribute, 1837. Oil on canvas, 98 × 126 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

Delacroix explored his ideas about Abd el-Malek’s virtues as a commander in this idealized image of leadership. Men and women gather to greet and honor the kaid, their faces raised toward him with awe. In response, he bows his head gently and extends his hand toward the milk in the proffered basin. As O’Brien points out, this image offers an almost ethnographic representation of the community and ceremony Delacroix encountered in 1832.⁸⁴ Nevertheless, the artist made some changes that privilege Abd el-Malek. To focus the viewer’s attention on the commander, Delacroix reverses the positions of the flag bearers and the commander as described in his 1832 notes, placing the latter at the very head of the troop. He also situates the kaid at the highest point of the composition, with the civilians on foot and his soldiers gathered behind and below him. Heightening Abd el-Malek’s centrality even further, Delacroix dresses him in a djellaba whose dazzling whiteness leaps out from the mass of drab ecru garments worn by the other figures in the painting. Finally, the two flags behind the commander help direct attention to him.

Delacroix conveys the commander’s fitness as a ruler by representing the approbation of the people who greet him, and he strengthens this message by referring to well-known Christian motifs. Abd el-Malek’s arrival outside Ksar el-Kebir, on horseback, echoes Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on the back of a mule. In the lower left corner of the painting, the little boy carrying a sprig of greenery evokes the biblical palm bearers who lined Christ’s path into the city. This iconographical filiation is further reinforced by the appearance of the people who greet Abd el-Malek. Delacroix portrays the two men in the welcome gathering wearing clothing with a distinctly classical air: an ivory burnous (on the younger man) and an ivory haik (on the older man). The garment of the latter, with its multiple folds, looks particularly Roman. Evidence that Christian themes were on Delacroix’s mind when he conceived of Moroccan Chieftain Receiving Tribute can be found on one of the few extant preparatory drawings, which bears a faint sketch of Saint Sebastian on the verso.⁸⁵ Delacroix’s decision to paint the kaid on a horse, rather than the mule he typically favored, suggests that the artist was consciously toying with the parallel. If the picture had looked too much like Christ’s arrival into Jerusalem, it might have caused consternation at the Salon. Comparing a Muslim cavalry commander to Christ would have been unlikely to please either the Salon jury or the Salon audience. As it was, the painting seems to have excited controversy among the members of the Salon jury, one-third of whom opposed its inclusion in the exhibition. As Johnson notes, Moroccan Chieftain was “the only one of the five pictures shown by Delacroix at the Salon that year for which a vote is recorded in the proceedings of the jury,” suggesting that “its acceptance met with considerable opposition.”⁸⁶

Delacroix’s depiction of Abd el-Malek’s entry in Ksar el-Kebir presages one of his later history paintings, Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople (1840; fig. 49). Commissioned by the French government, this work was supposed to join dozens of other canvases by a wide range of artists for Louis-Philippe’s Hall of the Crusades at Versailles.⁸⁷ The king envisioned this project as an historical justification for the French takeover of Algeria: the Crusades were to serve as a precedent for modern Christian European hegemony in the greater Mediterranean.⁸⁸ The episode conferred to Delacroix involves the 1204 capture of Constantinople by the forces of Baldwin of Flanders, future Latin emperor of that city. Because Constantinople was part of the Byzantine Empire in 1204, Louis-Philippe’s choice of subject matter might seem peculiar, but the historical precedent of a Frankish knight conquering that city doubtless appealed to the modern government’s desire to subjugate the Ottoman Empire, which was headquartered in Constantinople.

fig. 49 | Eugène Delacroix, Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, April 12, 1204, 1840. Oil on canvas, 411 × 497 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

Oddly, given its status as an official commission, Delacroix’s monumental canvas undermines Louis-Philippe’s triumphalist vision. In his painting, groups of miserable pleading civilians prostrate themselves before Baldwin as he rides into the city, but it is not at all clear from the composition whether Baldwin will show them mercy. Johnson points out the ambiguity of Entry of the Crusaders by comparing Baldwin to the Ottoman soldier in The Massacres of Chios, observing, “Now the Christian, not the Infidel, is the oppressor” (see fig. 4).⁸⁹ Perhaps Delacroix’s equivocal representation of Baldwin was inspired by the fact that the Crusaders unleashed an infamously devastating attack on Constantinople, pillaging and laying waste to its renowned beauty and riches and murdering and raping its citizens. Not long after he produced this painting, in fact, Delacroix criticized similar cultural destruction by the French in Algeria during the 1830s.⁹⁰ His ambivalent image of Baldwin stands in stark contrast to his earlier, sympathetic portrayal of Abd el-Malek as a good leader who is welcomed and honored by the people.

If Delacroix’s depiction of the Moroccan general as a revered, beneficent leader attracted hostility from certain members of the 1838 Salon jury, a similar representation of Abd el-Malek as a noble warrior was met with outright rejection one year later. In 1839, the jury voted twelve to six against accepting Arab Soldier by a Grave, Delacroix’s 1838 exploration of the bond between Arab men and their horses (see fig. 45).⁹¹ We shall examine the implications of this decision, but first let us look at the painting itself. When he submitted it to the jury in 1839, Delacroix called the picture Warrior near a Grave, but in a list he compiled around 1845, he referred to it as Ben Abou by a Grave.⁹² If Delacroix saw Abd el-Malek kneel by a grave in 1832, he did not mention it in any of his letters, notes, or drawings. He did, however, sketch and comment frequently on tombs he saw during the trip, and not long after he returned to France, he recorded his recent discovery that one of the tombs he had seen outside Tangier belonged to Abd el-Malek’s grandfather.⁹³

Rather than paint that more grandiose monument, Delacroix chose to depict Abd el-Malek kneeling by a humbler gravesite. Jotting notes for his memoir some five years after making the painting, Delacroix observes of Moroccan burial sites, “Sometimes the tomb is only a simple enclosure made of modest stones laid unevenly by the hand of a friend.”⁹⁴ This description matches the setting in Arab Soldier by a Grave so closely that one must wonder whether Delacroix’s own 1838 painting shaped his 1843 recollections. Looking again at the painting, Delacroix’s statement recasts Arab Soldier by a Grave as a Moroccan man mourning the death of a friend. By endowing the painting with a generic title when he submitted it to the Salon jury, Delacroix gave it a more powerful resonance as a picture of an anonymous Moroccan soldier grieving one of his own. The man in the painting confronts death with calmness and emotional self-possession, those stoic qualities Delacroix admired so much in Moroccan men.⁹⁵ The man’s quiet contemplation of the potential outcome of a soldier’s vocation underscores his own courage in the face of death and his self-sacrifice for his country. These virtues were crucial principles of French military masculinity, here embodied by a Moroccan cavalryman.

Given the heroic light in which Arab Soldier by a Grave depicts a Moroccan soldier, its rejection by the jury raises questions about its contemporary political valence. Delacroix’s lyrical vision of Moroccan military valor may well have disturbed the Salon jury, which showed a strong preference that year for more conventional, negative images of Muslims in its admissions. Despite the hostility of at least one juror, who reportedly called it “disgusting,” the jury accepted Alexandre Decamps’s hateful Punishment of the Hooks, a painting that showcases Muslim cruelty (fig. 50).⁹⁶ Decamps’s troubled representation of state torture (and the crowd’s delectation of it) in Turkey acts almost as propaganda for the official government claim that the French were “liberating” Algerians from Turkish oppression. His image of Muslim sadism could hardly be further from Delacroix’s depiction of the contemplative soldier. The jury also accepted Horace Vernet’s idiosyncratic trilogy praising the armée d’Afrique in Algeria. The three canvases collectively known as The Siege of Constantine create a panoramic display of the French conquering this key Algerian city in October 1837 after a dramatic earlier failure (see fig. 39). In this suite of paintings, an ant-like proliferation of French soldiers swarms over a landscape from which Algerians themselves are largely absent.⁹⁷ The contrast between Vernet’s erasure of Algerians, Decamps’s vilification of Turks, and Delacroix’s poetic meditation on death in Morocco reveals the extent to which Delacroix acknowledged the humanity and dignity of Muslim Arab men and departed from conventional stereotypes of them as cruel or ineffectual.

fig. 50 | Alexandre Decamps, The Punishment of the Hooks, 1837. Oil on canvas, 90 × 135.5 cm. Wallace Collection, London. © Wallace Collection, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.

The critical response to Arab Soldier by a Grave further elucidates how the painting was seen by Delacroix’s contemporaries. To protest the jury’s decision, several critics included the painting in their reviews of the 1839 Salon. Significantly, the two who discussed it in the most detail both hinted broadly at the conflict in Algeria. Alphonse Tardieu argues of Delacroix’s image, “This meditation on danger and battle, upon a tomb, is an ingenious characterization of what life in the desert is.”⁹⁸ While this statement could be seen as a generic Orientalist attribution of violence to Arabs, it could just as easily be understood as a sly reference to what Algerian life had become at the hands of the French. During the 1830s, the Moroccan cavalry did not engage in any warfare outside of occasional internal domestic conflicts, but Algerian militias were constantly fighting either the French or one another.⁹⁹ The critic Haussard took the association a bit further when he described Arab Soldier by a Grave as an image of a soldier lamenting a recent death: “At the foot of small tumular mounds, prickling with gigantic African plants, the earth is newly disturbed: there, in a solemn and pious movement, kneels an Arab wearing his unchanging battle dress.”¹⁰⁰ By referring to recent death and military uniforms in the same breath, Haussard invokes the specter of Algeria. His description also suggests that Delacroix’s sympathetic painting might have possessed subversive undertones for some viewers.

Delacroix’s admiration for Abd el-Malek was no mere idealization, as he perceived at least one shortcoming in the commander, but he chose to emphasize in his paintings both Abd el-Malek’s positive character traits and his fitness for leadership.¹⁰¹ As we have seen here and in chapter 2, Delacroix’s view of Moroccan men as embodiments of a powerful, morally rigorous masculinity ran counter to typical French views of Arabs and Turks. His representation of Moroccans like Abd el-Malek as good rulers raises the question of whether his attitude toward the absolutist model of Moroccan governance was equally positive. In his 1832 letters from Tangier, Delacroix uses his characteristic irony when discussing this subject. After reading news of cholera and civil unrest in France, for example, he talks about the joys of living peacefully “under the scimitar of tyrants” in Morocco.¹⁰² In another 1832 letter, he observes drily that the Saint-Simonians, whose support for civil rights he viewed with skepticism, would have a great deal to protest in Morocco.¹⁰³ Whatever his views of the Moroccan government may have been, Delacroix found much to admire in some of the men who occupied leadership positions within that system. His glorification of Abd el-Malek as a paradigm of virtuous masculinity is the most pronounced instance of this, but as we shall see in the next chapter, he also portrayed the sultan of Morocco as a ruler worthy of respect. Delacroix’s attitude led to the execution of arguably the most important painting of his North African oeuvre, The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage (fig. 51). In this monumental canvas, Delacroix would reprise certain elements of Moroccan Chieftain Receiving Tribute to create a striking vision of Moroccan political authority that challenged prevailing views of the kingdom presented at the Salon of 1845.

Chapter 4 The Sultan’s Authority Painting and Politics at the Salon of 1845

In his review of Delacroix’s paintings at the Salon of 1845, Charles Blanc delivered a damning assessment of the French attack on Morocco at Isly the previous year: “The Battle of Isly was for Mr. Delacroix a wholly natural occasion to show the crowd [one of] these great equestrian portraits, the sketch for which he had brought back long ago, at the time of his travels in Morocco. Thus the Battle of Isly has at least had the merit of giving us one of the beautiful paintings of the Salon.—This is the clearest thing France will get out of it.”¹ As Blanc suggests, Delacroix’s enormous Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage was indeed based on the artist’s experiences during his 1832 trip to Morocco, specifically the audience granted by Sultan Abd er-Rahman to the French diplomatic delegation outside his palace in Meknes on March 22, 1832 (fig. 51). Although aware of the rarity of such an event and its pictorial possibilities, Delacroix let the project for a history painting about the meeting lie fallow for more than a decade. Thirteen years later, he exhibited his monumental Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage at the Salon of 1845 in Paris. Measuring more than twelve feet high, the painting hung in the salon carré at the Louvre, the room where the exhibition’s most important pictures were installed.² There, its commanding presence attracted the attention of countless Salon attendees. Inspired by recent developments in the French conquest of Algeria but rooted in a more distant event, the painting offered a glimpse of a little-seen monarch to the curious French public.

fig. 51 | Eugène Delacroix, The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, 1845. Oil on canvas, 384 × 343 cm. Mairie de Toulouse, Musée des Augustins. Photo: Daniel Martin.

By the time Delacroix decided to paint The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, Franco-Moroccan relations had shifted dramatically from their tense but essentially neutral 1832 position.³ While the French mission of that year had yielded the desired treaty, the agreement took up only two sets of issues: control over the contested border city of Tlemcen and conflicts in Franco-Moroccan trade. Significantly, the treaty failed to anticipate the Moroccan response to Algerian resistance movements. During the next twelve years, the resistance intensified under the leadership of Abd el-Kader and strengthened in the west, near the border of Morocco. Under domestic pressure from within, Sultan Abd er-Rahman opted to support Abd el-Kader by supplying him with food, arms, and horses and, more crucially, by allowing him to enter Moroccan territory freely. The French discovered this aid in the early 1840s, and conflict ensued. After a series of blunders by both France and Morocco in attempting to resolve their differences, the French attacked Morocco, bombarding the cities of Mogador and Tangier in August 1844. In the same month, the French army routed the Moroccan cavalry in a decisive battle at the river Isly. These events left Abd er-Rahman little choice but to sign a treaty with the French in which he withdrew amnesty for Abd el-Kader. The defeat of the Moroccan cavalry at Isly also damaged the international reputation of the kingdom’s armed forces. Morocco’s status in relation to France had thus changed substantially between Delacroix’s visit in 1832 and the Salon exhibition in 1845. Rather than being a military power to be feared and avoided, Morocco had become a reluctant ally of sorts for the French.

Given the tumultuous sequence of events preceding Delacroix’s decision to paint The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, the picture’s political significance presents a crucial line of inquiry. Yet, while the chronology of its genesis has been carefully scrutinized and debated, the painting’s position within French political culture has received surprisingly little attention.⁴ After first describing The Sultan of Morocco as an image of a “grand potentate” in 1982, Johnson later expanded on this interpretation, calling Delacroix’s picture both a “tribute” and “a personal, uncommissioned homage” to Abd er-Rahman.⁵ In 1970, Frank Trapp had expressed a quite different view, implying that The Sultan of Morocco depicts an enemy of the French because, with its ranks of Moroccan soldiers and its “aloof and uninviting” monarch, the painting captures “the implacable hostility of an entire culture.”⁶ Nochlin revisited this argument thirteen years after Trapp, using Said’s foundational critique of Western representations of the “East” to characterize the picture as a triumphalist image of a defeated enemy of the French. Because France had recently bested Morocco at the battle of Isly, she argued, Delacroix’s sultan was little more than a “vanquished opponent” surrounded by an entourage of “defeated leaders.”⁷ While the claims of Nochlin and Trapp are suggestive (given the tensions in Franco-Moroccan relations in 1844), they are far too totalizing. Moreover, neither scholar looks at the precise ways in which the painting allegedly upholds such notions of Western superiority over the unfriendly East. In contrast, I argue that close examination of the painting itself, as well as its relation to imperialist imagery by Delacroix’s contemporaries, shows that The Sultan of Morocco resists the Orientalist ideologies ascribed to it by Nochlin and Trapp, presenting instead a forceful image of the sultan as an autonomous, powerful leader.

Picturing Moroccan Political Authority

Based on its vast physical dimensions alone, The Sultan of Morocco is both Delacroix’s most ambitious North African painting and one of the most important history paintings of his career.⁸ On a basic level, the massive size of the canvas proposes that the man who is its subject is also monumental. The composition conveys Abd er-Rahman’s sovereignty in similar terms. Far in the distance, a huge palace wall—far larger than the actual structure Delacroix saw—demarcates the boundary of a wide plaza.⁹ Along with the sheer scale of this ceremonial space and the architecture around it, Delacroix used a constellation of pictorial devices to suggest that the sultan possesses considerable authority. He depicted Abd er-Rahman sitting on a dappled gray steed, a solitary figure on horseback who rises high above the massive contingent of soldiers standing at attention on the plaza. While this compositional choice reflects the Moroccan royal protocol as Delacroix witnessed it in 1832, the arrangement nevertheless emphasizes the sultan’s dominance over the standing cavalrymen, who were forbidden to sit on horseback during such events.¹⁰ Delacroix reminded his viewers that the three men flanking the sultan in the foreground were powerful individuals in their own right by identifying them by name and rank in the Salon catalogue. At the far left, he portrays Amin Bias, who played a role in the Moroccan government akin to minister of trade and, more important, acted as lead negotiator with foreign powers. The figure between Bias and Abd er-Rahman is Moukhtar el-Jamaï, a man who was one of the sultan’s most important advisors during the 1830s. At the right, Delacroix includes Mohammed ben Abou ben Abd el-Malek, the Royal Cavalry commander whom he admired so greatly.¹¹ By placing these prestigious individuals on foot, the artist gave visual expression to the sultan’s supremacy over them.

Delacroix’s choice of genre further enhanced his representation of Abd er-Rahman as a figure of consequence. The equestrian portrait had long been a favored means of communicating the authoritative status of a subject.¹² By using this well-established pictorial convention, Delacroix inscribed Abd er-Rahman within the tradition of French leadership portraiture and effectively affirmed his identity as a powerful ruler. This visual affinity is reinforced by Delacroix’s reference to imagery of Louis-Philippe, a link that has hitherto been overlooked. At the Salon of 1831, Ary Scheffer had exhibited a portrait of the French king on horseback next to the Barrière du Trône in Paris (fig. 52).¹³ Situated on the outskirts of the city, the monument served as the meeting place on August 4, 1830, for Louis Philippe (then the Duc d’Orléans) and his eldest son, who was leading his cavalry unit to Paris to secure the safety of the royal family after his father was declared king.¹⁴ In contrast to the massive palace wall at Meknes, the Barrière du Trône is visible only as an enormous column atop a base at the right of the picture, but both paintings share the notion that portraying a leader near a politically significant structure underscores his right to rule. This association is reiterated in another early image, Horace Vernet’s The Duc d’Orléans Proceeds to the Hôtel de Ville, 31 July 1830 (fig. 53). Exhibited at the Salon of 1833, this canvas depicts the not-yet-crowned monarch on horseback, silhouetted against the gates of the Palais Royal, while a crowd of French citizens celebrates in the foreground. Delacroix probably saw both of the paintings by Scheffer and Vernet when they were first exhibited, if not at the Musée du Luxembourg in subsequent years, and he may well have had them in mind when he made a preliminary oil sketch for The Sultan of Morocco in 1832 or 1833 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes) and then again when he first returned to the subject in the 1840s. As Paul Joannides persuasively demonstrates, Delacroix had a penchant for reworking themes first introduced by other artists.¹⁵

fig. 52 | Ary Scheffer, The Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom Receives at the Barrière du Trône the First Regiment of Hussards under the Command of the duc de Chartres, 4 August 1830, 1836. Oil on canvas, 119 × 90.5 cm. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

fig. 53 | Horace Vernet, The Duc d’Orléans Proceeds to the Hôtel de Ville, 31 July 1830, 1832. Oil on canvas, 215 × 261.5 cm. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

By calling on 1830s imagery of Louis-Philippe, Delacroix suggests that Abd er-Rahman is a ruler of similar power and status, but the visual language of the sultan’s leadership manifests significant differences from that of the French king. Whereas Vernet minimized Louis-Philippe’s presence in his painting to better stress both the tricolor flag in the foreground and the diversity of the social types who support their leader-to-be, Delacroix reverses the equation.¹⁶ Abd er-Rahman occupies the most prominent position in Delacroix’s canvas, and the soldiers who surround him blend into one homogeneous blur. Rather than enjoying the enthusiastic acclaim of the people, Delacroix’s sultan receives deferential treatment from his soldiers, attendants, and ministers. Thus, Vernet’s painting proposes that Louis-Philippe rules with the support of the people, while Delacroix’s picture portrays a man who wields power over his subjects.

In addition to mining recent pictorial conventions for their efficacy in indicating political authority, Delacroix may have had additional motives for referring to paintings of Louis-Philippe. When recounting the audience with Abd er-Rahman in his Meknes sketchbook in 1832, the artist expressed his opinion that the sultan bore a “strong resemblance to Louis-Philippe.”¹⁷ The similarity may have been both physical and political. As Louis-Philippe’s rule became steadily more authoritarian in the years following his accession to power, it may have looked more like what Delacroix had jokingly referred to as living under the “scimitar of tyrants” in Morocco.¹⁸ In other ways, however, the French king seems to have provided Delacroix with a foil to the sultan. One was a constitutional monarch, the other a hereditary, absolutist leader. As Michael Marrinan shows, portraits of Louis-Philippe painted during the 1830s were fashioned carefully to present a physically approachable (and therefore legitimate) ruler. Even when Louis-Philippe’s official portraiture shifted in the 1840s to depict a more imposing monarch, the principle of accessibility remained.¹⁹ In contrast to these paintings, Delacroix’s image of the sultan projects a more equivocal message. On the one hand, the sultan’s very visibility is a deeply meaningful accomplishment given his extreme inaccessibility both politically and physically. Only a handful of Frenchmen had actually been granted the rare privilege of an audience with Abd er-Rahman, and in 1845, Delacroix was still the only European artist to have seen him. But while Delacroix made the sultan visible, he also manipulated the structure of the painting to create an aura of regal distance and power.

By selecting an outsize canvas and composing its elements with care, Delacroix crafted a visually persuasive representation of Sultan Abd er-Rahman’s political authority. Towering over his cavalry and the most powerful men in his administration, framed by an immense gate, Delacroix’s sultan demands recognition. The painting’s filiation from French leadership imagery both strengthens its overall assertion of power and hints at the nature of that power. Johnson’s characterization of The Sultan of Morocco as an image of a “grand potentate” thus seems justified, but such an interpretation does not eliminate the possibility that Abd er-Rahman is also pictured as a defeated leader. He was, after all, the ruler of a kingdom whose forces France had routed in a recent battle. Delacroix resolved this uncertainty by identifying Abd er-Rahman specifically and thoroughly as a North African ruler. At first, this approach may not seem like a strategy at all, since a portrait of a Moroccan ruler will naturally contain North African imagery and because such authenticity further serves the purpose of establishing the artist’s credentials as a witness to the event. Yet Delacroix’s painting goes beyond the requirements of mere pictorial pragmatism in his attention to the particularities of locale. As I shall demonstrate, this devotion to detail maintains a degree of geographic purity that moves past the demands of authenticity to stake a claim for the political autonomy of the sultan.

In the Salon catalogue, the painting’s deferential title—Moulay Abd-er-Rahman, Sultan of Morocco, Leaving His Palace at Meknes, Surrounded by His Guard and His Principal Officers—immediately established both the sultan’s identity and the foreign setting.²⁰ Similarly, Delacroix saturated his picture with visual references to North Africa. The modular forms of the buildings are typical of Moroccan architecture, and the distinctive keyhole shape and tiled frame of the gate in the background locates it firmly in a country with a long history of Muslim rule. As an additional signifier of Islam, Delacroix included a set of prayer beads clasped around the arm that Abd er-Rahman extends toward the viewer (fig. 54).²¹ Delacroix provided another reference to place by assigning the sultan’s fabric-wielding attendant a prominent position in the painting at Abd er-Rahman’s left side and referring to him directly in the Salon catalogue, where he describes the man as “a page who was responsible for shaking a piece of fabric from time to time to brush away insects.”²²

fig. 54 | Eugène Delacroix, The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, detail of fig. 51.

The sultan’s dappled gray horse, with his proudly arched neck and gorgeous gear, supplied yet another cultural and geographical marker. Delacroix points out in the catalogue that the beast was “a barb horse of great height,” thereby acknowledging the growing fashion for Arab and barb horses and establishing the locale of his painting as a North African one.²³ Delacroix’s use of color in the bright blue sky and golden atmosphere further enhanced the distinctively North African qualities of the setting. French Salon critics like Blanc and Gautier responded enthusiastically to this characteristic, which they perceived as integral to any painting of the Maghreb.²⁴ Although it attracted little comment, race constitutes another element that makes The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage an image of specifically North African leadership. The presence of a Black attendant and several Black soldiers would have quickly evoked Africa to a French audience, even if it did not guarantee an African locale for the picture. The soldiers were members of the ‘abid, a corps of the Moroccan army stationed primarily in Meknes.²⁵ Delacroix also underscored geographic and ethnic (then considered racial) difference deliberately in his depiction of the Arab men, especially the sultan, whose face and arms are almost as dark as those of his Black attendant.²⁶ This accentuation reinforces Abd er-Rahman’s difference from European rulers and reiterates his status as an African.

The clothing of the men in the painting also plays a crucial part in delineating the North African setting of The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage. All of the figures in the picture wear the characteristic dress of the Maghreb: djellabas and, for the four most powerful men, burnouses. All but one of the latter also wear the haik, a garment that was highly typical of Moroccan garb as discussed in chapter 2.²⁷ The complicated layers and folds of these garments and the way they conceal the body were distinct from the clothing of Turks (and, to a large extent, Egyptian and Mameluk subjects of the Ottoman Empire, who were sartorially influenced by Turks). As noted in chapter 2, Turks typically wore short, roomy pantaloons, embroidered waist-length vests and jackets, and long, tailored coats, as opposed to the plainer, more voluminous garments worn by Moroccans. They also sported wide sashes wrapped around the waist, into which revolvers or short swords were often tucked (see figs. 21 and 55).²⁸ By replicating the garments he had seen in Meknes, Delacroix demonstrated his own knowledge and guaranteed an authentically Moroccan setting.

Delacroix’s work on The Sultan of Morocco from 1832 to 1845 reveals an intensification of its North African elements and a corresponding diminution of European aspects as the painting progressed. The sketches Delacroix made before beginning The Sultan of Morocco show that he altered his original conception substantially in order to represent a purely North African group in the final Salon painting. Shortly after his return from Morocco, Delacroix had created an oil sketch and a series of drawings that depict the 1832 meeting between Mornay and Abd er-Rahman (fig. 56).²⁹ In these horizontally formatted images, the sultan and most of his men are gathered on the left side of the composition while the French delegation is clustered on the right, almost hidden by their Moroccan escort. In 1845, however, Delacroix removed the Europeans from the composition and adopted a vertical format.

fig. 55 | Joseph Aved, Mehemet Said Pacha, Bey of Roumélie, 1742. Oil on canvas, 238 × 161 cm. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

fig. 56 | Eugène Delacroix, study for The Sultan of Morocco, ca. 1833. Black graphite drawing, 19.8 × 30.7 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

One reason he did so, as Elie Lambert first argued, was probably to bring the image up to date for an 1845 audience, who would have had little memory of the 1832 mission.³⁰ Pushing this idea further, Nochlin conjectures that including the delegation would have been neither “appropriate” nor “politically tactful” in view of the supposedly unfavorable light cast by the recent skirmishes on earlier diplomatic efforts, like the 1832 mission.³¹ Delacroix, however, is hardly an artist we associate with political tact, so the notion that he would make such an adjustment out of concern for government sensibilities is not entirely persuasive. Johnson proposes that Delacroix decided not to include the French group because “their presence in the picture would have diminished its timeless quality,” a point to which I shall return shortly.³² I would suggest another interpretation, namely that Delacroix suppressed the French delegation in order to make the picture wholly Moroccan. Although this absence removes the painting’s primary historical referent, it allows the picture to remain mute on the subject of French engagements in North Africa. In tandem with the lengths to which he went to portray the sultan as a powerful figure, Delacroix’s removal of the French delegation suggests that he also sought to stress Abd er-Rahman’s autonomy.

With its emphasis on the sultan’s authority and independence, The Sultan of Morocco presented a view of Moroccan power that apparently contradicted the evidence of recent history, and nothing in the picture indicates that the kingdom had just suffered military defeats and diplomatic setbacks. Nochlin argues that the absence of contemporary history in French Orientalist paintings masks the French-induced violence and warfare that characterized Algerian life in the nineteenth century.³³ If we were to apply this schema to Delacroix’s picture, the lacuna would make his portrait just another example of French colonialist imagery. The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage certainly makes no visual allusions to the recent Moroccan skirmishes with France. In this particular instance, however, ahistoricity fails to secure an interpretation of the picture as an exemplar of paternalist colonial ideology. Morocco had been an independent kingdom for nearly a millennium, unlike Algeria, which had been controlled for centuries by the Ottoman Empire prior to the French invasion.³⁴ In contrast to ongoing French warfare and colonization in Algeria, by 1845, Morocco and France had had only two episodes of military conflict (the battle of Isly and the bombardment of Tangier and Mogador), both in the same month. The terms of the treaty resulting from this brief clash, though favoring France, nevertheless established a collaborative relationship between the two kingdoms, a very different state of affairs from France’s ruthless subjugation of Algeria.

The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage called attention to the kingdom’s distinctive, independent status. By setting the painting in the heartland city of Meknes, Delacroix maintained historical authenticity and separated the sultan from the turmoil that had taken place in the coastal city of Tangier and on the plains near the Algerian border. This choice results in an image in which both the heart of Morocco and the kingdom’s leader appear untroubled by the recent conflict with France. Abd er-Rahman is surrounded by his ministers and army, but their calm demeanor reveals neither anxiety nor urgency. Similarly, the sultan himself projects a stately dignity at odds with any notion of warfare or defeat. As we have seen, The Sultan of Morocco’s pictorial devices characterize Abd er-Rahman as a figure of considerable political authority. In this context, the absence of historically precise visual information suggests that Delacroix excised such specificities partly in order to strengthen the painting’s persuasive powers. His strategy here runs counter to the conventional wisdom about the absence of history in nineteenth-century French paintings of North Africa. Art-historical scholarship on these images has interpreted such absences as a means of asserting North Africa’s inferiority to France and thereby justifying conquest and colonization.³⁵ Untouched by technological innovations in the West, so the fantasy goes, the East retains its timeless, primitive character, remaining at a less advanced stage of civilization. More specific to our painting, Peter Rautmann proposes that the atemporality of The Sultan of Morocco opposed North African stasis to European progress.³⁶

When examined more closely, however, Delacroix’s eschewal of visual references to a specific historical moment does something quite different: rather than represent Morocco as a kingdom frozen in time, it reinforces the image of the sultan as a powerful leader. Abd er-Rahman belonged to the Alawite dynasty, which had ruled Morocco since the seventeenth century. The Alawites are a branch of the Sharifian dynasty, whose members are believed to be descendants of the Prophet. Abd er-Rahman’s lineage was thus both aristocratic and, in the eyes of his people, divine.³⁷ Delacroix reflected on this view in the memoir he wrote in the early 1840s: “It is the status of emperor or rather that of descendant of Mohammed that [Moroccans] respect more than the person who is endowed with the supreme character. They change sovereigns with the greatest ease; but they will never put any in his place but a Sharif or descendant of Mohammed.”³⁸ By painting the sultan in a context that could denote almost any moment in his rule, Delacroix participated in the same justification of leadership that typified images of European monarchs. Eliminating historically precise signifiers, the artist portrayed the institution of the sultanate as well as the reign of this specific sultan.³⁹ Descendants of the Prophet had ruled Morocco since shortly after the Arab conquest in the eighth century. Delacroix’s painting implies that they always would.

In The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, then, the absence of history signals Abd er-Rahman’s aristocratic status and his claim to a divine right to rule. The lack of historical references centers the painting squarely on Abd er-Rahman and the grandeur of his ceremonial departure from his palace. Emphasizing the sultan’s uncompromised status as a hereditary ruler, Delacroix used atemporality to acknowledge Abd er-Rahman’s authority and autonomy. Accordingly, the notion that The Sultan of Morocco should be understood as a celebration of France’s domination of Morocco not only ignores but also contradicts the visual evidence of the painting as well as the historical facts of the recent alliance between the two kingdoms.

The Capture of the Parasol

Along with Delacroix’s deliberate suppression of precise historical referents, his careful use of distinctively Moroccan signifiers created a seemingly timeless image that is untouched by contemporary events. By emphasizing the autonomous status of the monarch it depicts, Delacroix’s picture resists the negative implications of recent Franco-Moroccan conflicts and maintains the lofty authority of the sultan. Yet, while The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage is largely atemporal, history crept into the painting in several ways. Delacroix’s decision to take up this subject was motivated by the events of 1844, and his text for the Salon catalogue refers both to the diplomatic mission of 1832 and, obliquely, to the recent strife.⁴⁰ Within the picture itself, the sultan’s parasol evoked contemporary events more openly, if still quite subtly, and thereby warrants closer investigation.

For Delacroix’s Salon audience, Abd er-Rahman’s parasol was another detail that underscores the specifically Moroccan context. Held by the second attendant, this green-and-red accessory occupies a prominent position within the picture (fig. 57). Mounted on a long handle, it curves high above both Abd er-Rahman’s head and the outline of the palace wall behind him. Its bright green outer surface and deep red interior offer a striking contrast of complementary colors, which is further accented by the parasol’s stark silhouette against the azure blue sky. Delacroix paid special attention to this attribute of power in his 1832 notes about the meeting with the sultan, where he describes its constituent parts briefly but carefully: “Parasol with an unpainted wooden handle; a small ball of gold at the top. Red above and in compartments. Underneath red and green.”⁴¹ Although he consulted his notes when he executed the 1845 painting, Delacroix chose to reverse the parasol’s color scheme, switching the positions of the red and green, a decision with meaningful implications that we shall examine shortly. The visual importance Delacroix ascribed to the parasol seems to have been more reflective of French interpretation than of Moroccan practice: Jocelyne Dakhlia shows that early modern Moroccans assigned only a minor role to such regalia, whereas the sultan’s pristine white garb and the ceremony itself were much more important.⁴²

fig. 57 | Eugène Delacroix, The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, detail of fig. 51.

Although Delacroix did not mention the parasol in his text for the Salon catalogue, he hardly needed to do so, because the significance of Moroccan parasols was already well known to his viewers. During the French victory at the battle of Isly, the army had captured the parasol of the man leading the Moroccan forces. This person was none other than the sultan’s son Sidi Mohammed ben Abd er-Rahman, known as Sidi Mohammed. The seizure of his attribute of power constituted a tremendous symbolic victory for the French, greater even than the more commonplace triumph of capturing enemy flags. On October 5, 1844, the popular journal L’Illustration explained the apparent meaning of the parasol to its readers by publishing a description and several prints of it and reported that it had been ceremoniously deposited at the Hôtel des Invalides (fig. 58).⁴³ Unlike the object in The Sultan of Morocco, Sidi Mohammed’s parasol had a green interior and a deep red exterior, and it was further differentiated by extensive silver embroidery on the exterior and fringe hanging from its edges.⁴⁴ Different as it was from the one in Delacroix’s painting, the presence of one parasol in The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage doubtless evoked the fate of the other.

fig. 58 | Sidi Mohammed’s Parasol, Profile View, detail, from L’Illustration, October 5, 1844, 78. Wood engraving. Artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author.

The case of the parasol reveals that Delacroix’s painting would have been grounded historically for viewers at the Salon of 1845 despite the overall atemporality of the image. The military clash between France and Morocco had taken place in August 1844. On September 14, Moroccan flags captured at Isly were officially presented at the Hôtel des Invalides. Shortly afterward, the tent belonging to Sidi Mohammed was erected and opened to the public in Paris at the Jardin des Tuileries.⁴⁵ The Salon opened six months later, on March 15, 1845. Delacroix’s portrait was thus exhibited at a time when Morocco and its relationship with France were major news items. Contemporary history seeped into the painting from other directions as well. To begin with, Delacroix’s decision to paint The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage was undoubtedly triggered by the battle of Isly. As Lambert suggests, Delacroix was probably inspired to develop a large-scale Salon painting with a specifically Moroccan theme by the heightened public interest in Morocco and by an earlier request for Moroccan imagery from L’Illustration.⁴⁶ The journal had asked Delacroix for several woodcuts of Morocco shortly after the 1844 conflicts, and on September 21, 1844, they published one of his earlier drawings of Sultan Abd er-Rahman. Delacroix’s woodcut print L’empereur Muley-Abd-el-Rahman accompanied an article about the sultan and the recently signed treaty between France and Morocco (fig. 59).⁴⁷ In the newspaper, Delacroix’s image of Abd er-Rahman was surrounded physically by text spelling out the terms of the new Franco-Moroccan alliance. In this instance, the very figure of the sultan himself referred to the recent military conflicts and, more important, to their resolution.

fig. 59 | Regnier, Hotelin, Best, and Leloir, after Eugène Delacroix, L’empereur Muley-Abd-el-Rahman, from L’Illustration, September 21, 1844, 33. Wood engraving. Artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author.

Although Delacroix cultivated timelessness in his imagery, the parasol (like the sultan) was historically specific. Did the parasol, then, undermine the artist’s depiction of Abd er-Rahman as a powerful and autonomous ruler? If we interpret this object as a signifier of defeat because of its similarity to the captured parasol of the sultan’s son, then we must answer in the affirmative, but this understanding is flawed, because the very presence of the parasol in The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage asserts to a French audience Abd er-Rahman’s continued authority. The painted parasol ultimately reinforces the picture’s overall message of Moroccan power and independence because it takes nothing away from the dignified autonomy of the sultan and, in fact, reminds viewers that his sovereignty endures. As the symbol of his royal status, the parasol proclaims his right to rule, and the absence of the son’s parasol has no effect on the presence of the father’s. By reversing the color scheme from what he had perceived in 1832—red exterior and green interior, like Sidi Mohammed’s parasol—to green exterior and red interior in 1845, Delacroix sharpened the distinction between the two objects. His inclusion of the parasol not only resists the implication that Morocco had been weakened by its clashes with the French but also suggests that these struggles had no effect on the sultan’s authority.

It is important to remember that in 1845, especially during the previous six-month period when Delacroix executed the painting, Morocco had become a partner, not a foe, of France (at least from the French perspective). Delacroix himself hints at this development in the Salon catalogue, where he acknowledges the events of 1844 in his characterization of one of the main figures of the painting. Describing Abd el-Malek, commander of the Moroccan Royal Cavalry, Delacroix writes that his “name had figured in the latest war and in the negotiations.”⁴⁸ After the French bombarded Tangier, Abd el-Malek had reportedly saved the European embassies from being looted and had eventually restored order to the city after widespread fires. Shortly afterward, the sultan rewarded him by naming him pasha (governor) of Tangier. With these acts, Abd el-Malek solidified his growing reputation as a key diplomatic partner for European powers.⁴⁹ As we saw in chapter 3, Delacroix regarded the commander as a heroic figure. By identifying Abd el-Malek in the catalogue, the artist reminded his viewers that one of the sultan’s ministers was unquestionably not an enemy.

Delacroix’s invocation of the 1832 mission in the Salon catalogue gave the painting the historical authenticity required by the exhibition organizers, but it also had the effect of further strengthening his portrayal of Abd er-Rahman as an autonomous ruler.⁵⁰ In 1832, the sultan’s independence was unquestioned, and his army was still considered a formidable institution. Abd er-Rahman’s ability to support the Algerian resistance against the French was compromised fatally by the events of 1844, but the outcome of these conflicts resulted in a new alliance between the kingdoms of France and Morocco. Visually, the painting asserts the sultan’s authority at multiple levels and glosses over the clashes of 1844, stressing instead the continuity between 1832 and 1845.

Delacroix’s relatively positive portrayal of Abd er-Rahman may strike us as a controversial choice, particularly if we have grown accustomed to seeing the painting as an imperialist image of a “vanquished opponent,” but contemporary criticism of The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage shows that reviewers had little trouble accepting Delacroix’s vision. No critic, not even the writer for the procolonization newspaper L’Algérie, raised an eyebrow at the image of the sultan as a powerful figure.⁵¹ As we shall see, two reviewers referred to the French attacks on Morocco, but both did so in negative terms. Such nonchalance suggests that Delacroix’s critical audience accepted the artist’s representation of Abd er-Rahman’s sovereignty. In effect, the notion that Morocco was more an ally than a foe may have neutralized for some contemporary viewers the painting’s potential controversy as an affirmation of Moroccan power.

Nevertheless, the French government showed little interest in purchasing the picture, and as I will demonstrate, Delacroix’s correspondence reveals that he went to some lengths to persuade the state to buy it. When he undertook this enormous, ambitious, and unusual portrait, he did so without any guarantee that it would eventually be purchased. By relying on his own financial resources, he had a greater degree of ideological freedom than did his colleagues who were commissioned to depict North African subjects for Louis-Philippe. He ran the risk, however, that his representation of Abd er-Rahman as an independent figure would jeopardize its chances of being acquired by the state. The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage might have returned to the artist’s studio, to hang in oblivion, had not Delacroix persuaded the government to accept it in place of The Death of Marcus Aurelius (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon), another 1845 submission that was purchased after the Salon. Delacroix wrote to François Cavé, head of the Fine Arts division of the Ministry of the Interior, to petition for the exchange: “If it is possible for the Ministry to take the Emperor of Morocco instead of Marcus Aurelius, I would prefer it for all kinds of reasons.”⁵² Once the exchange was effected, Delacroix noted that he “sincerely rejoice[d]” in the government’s decision.⁵³ Because Marcus Aurelius was a much smaller painting, it must have been of lesser financial value. Delacroix’s negotiations and subsequent relief suggest both that he feared he would be unable to give The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage a worthy home and that he preferred to see it, rather than Marcus Aurelius, hanging in a museum.⁵⁴

Although Delacroix never addressed directly his motives for depicting the sultan as he did, his evident admiration for Moroccan masculinity and leadership during the 1830s and early 1840s provide some understanding of his choice. Similarly, his negative views about the effects of conquest and colonization in Algeria show that he was no supporter of French imperialism in North Africa.⁵⁵ If Delacroix viewed the French campaign in Algeria with a less-than-enthusiastic eye, his friend Blanc stated his disapprobation of the conflict’s spillover into Morocco openly in his review of The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage. There, Blanc observes that the only clear gain France stood to make from its attack on the Moroccan army at Isly was that it inspired Delacroix to produce a painting of great beauty.⁵⁶ Blanc’s words reveal that he saw the recent Franco-Moroccan conflict as fruitless, even frivolous. Similarly, another critic interpreted Delacroix’s painting in 1845 as a meditation on the tragic destruction of North African civilization by European forces. Writing about The Sultan of Morocco in L’Artiste, Arsène Houssaye lamented the fate of “the poetry of the desert that is going to be engulfed beneath European civilization, a thousand times more barbarous than Barbary itself.”⁵⁷ Abandoning the veiled critiques of colonialism delivered by critics Haussard and Tardieu in their 1839 defense of Delacroix’s Arab Soldier by a Grave, Blanc and Houssaye display their hostility to the French incursion into Morocco frankly. For his part, Delacroix exhibited a painting that both glorifies the sultan and eschews celebration of the attacks. These positions ran counter to the preponderance of public opinion, which approved of the French expeditions in Morocco on the grounds that France had thereby gained an advantage over Britain.⁵⁸

Competing Visions of Power at the Salon of 1845

Within the Salon exhibition, Delacroix’s painting of an authoritative Moroccan ruler competed with a legion of pictures that presented variations on the theme of imperialist and colonialist triumph in North Africa: their embrace of the official French position reveals the distinctiveness of Delacroix’s portrayal of the sultan. In response to the recent conflicts, several artists took up the subject of French military victories over Morocco in their Salon pictures. Henri Durand-Brager, for example, exhibited two seascapes dramatizing the bombardment of Mogador; in a similar vein, Léon Morel-Fatio showed a canvas lauding the leadership of the Prince de Joinville, one of Louis-Philippe’s sons, during the attack on Tangier.⁵⁹ In all three pictures, the French receive the lion’s share of the pictorial attention, their Moroccan opponents made either miniscule or invisible. Paintings by Adolphe Beaucé, Marie-Alexandre Longuet, and Emmanuel Massé featured episodes from the battle of Isly, and Charles-Philippe Larivière’s portrait of Field Marshal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, who led the French forces at Isly, sounded another note of triumphant imperialism.⁶⁰ Although it was much smaller in scale, the presence of Bugeaud’s portrait in the same room as The Sultan of Morocco dramatized the grandeur of Delacroix’s painting. Rounding out the group of nationalistic images of the Moroccan conflict, Jacques Guiaud exhibited three small views of Sidi Mohammed’s tent from its installation in the Tuileries the previous September (fig. 60).⁶¹ These paintings played an important part in establishing Morocco as an enemy—and a defeated one at that. Individually, none of them could present much of a challenge to a monumental canvas by an artistic heavyweight like Delacroix. Taken together, however, they constituted a strong counter to Delacroix’s projection of the sultan as an autonomous and powerful figure.

fig. 60 | Jacques Guiaud, View of the Tent of the Son of the Sultan of Morocco at the Tuileries Garden in 1844, 1845. Oil on canvas, 23 × 49 cm. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

fig. 61 | Horace Vernet, The Capture of the Smala of Abd el-Kader, May 16, 1843, 1844–45. Oil on canvas, 489 × 2,139 cm. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

Horace Vernet, long the darling of Louis-Philippe’s arts administration, was a much more formidable rival to Delacroix and his positive representation of North African leadership than any of the other artists who had focused on Morocco. Although it dealt with Algeria rather than Morocco, Vernet’s The Capture of the Smala of Abd el-Kader provided the strongest counterclaim to Delacroix’s vision of North African independence (fig. 61). When exhibited in the salon carré in 1845, The Capture of the Smala hung on the wall across from Delacroix’s painting, directly opposite the entrance to the room.⁶² Visitors to the Salon exhibition, strolling into the salon carré, were confronted not with Delacroix’s portrait but with the awesome sight of Vernet’s seventy-foot-long battle painting. This monstrously large picture, commemorating a decisive victory in the French takeover of Algeria, was positioned to seize the viewer’s eye at the very moment of entry into the room. The Capture of the Smala’s privileged site and overwhelming size established for it a primacy that was unrivaled by any other work in the exhibition. Located across the room from Vernet’s colossus, Delacroix’s The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage could be seen only after the viewer turned around.⁶³

This arrangement literally placed The Sultan of Morocco in opposition to French military activity in North Africa. Vernet’s painting celebrated a hugely important event in the ongoing French war in Algeria, one that predated the Moroccan conflicts of 1844 by a little more than a year. In May 1843, the Algerian campaign had received a massive boost when troops led by the Duc d’Aumale, another of Louis-Philippe’s sons, seized the headquarters of the Algerian resistance movement. This was an ambulatory city, or zmala, created by the leader of the resistance, Abd el-Kader. The “Smala,” as it became known in France, comprised Abd el-Kader’s administration, an army of five thousand men, and a civilian population of about twenty-five thousand. The latter included many members of Abd el-Kader’s family. He also kept his treasury and his considerable assets there, including large herds of livestock that were precious to the resource-hungry French forces.⁶⁴ The seizure of this gargantuan encampment was a major coup for the French. Their military feat was all the more satisfying because the army that captured it was quite small. Although it was portrayed as an example of French military might, the taking of the Smala was mostly an incident of great luck and dubious risk-taking. The Duc d’Aumale and his force of five hundred soldiers had stumbled on the Smala by accident. Abd el-Kader and much of his army were absent at the time, otherwise the French attack would probably have been repelled with catastrophic consequences for them.⁶⁵ Possibly without knowing of Abd el-Kader’s absence, the Duc d’Aumale leapt at the opportunity to launch a chancy (even foolhardy) attack that happened to result in a French victory.

Unlike Delacroix’s portrait, Vernet’s painting emerged from an official commission by Louis-Philippe’s administration. Indeed, Marrinan argues persuasively that the king himself took a close personal interest in the production of The Capture of the Smala.⁶⁶ Vernet set the action of his painting on a flat, dusty plain with low mountains set far in the distance. Nearly the entire upper half of the picture is devoted to empty blue sky, while hundreds of figures swarm about on the ground. Here and there, at different depths within the canvas, Vernet distinguished particular groups from the surrounding masses of French soldiers and Algerian civilians. He also added picturesque details, such as fleeing gazelles and still lifes composed of Algerian objects. Devoting much care to the rendering of costume, fabrics, and ethnicity, Vernet turned his picture of battle into an exercise in quasi-ethnographic observation. In fact, the artist essentially combines several genres in his work, a talent that was not lost on critics.⁶⁷ This synthesis, with its obsessive attention to crowd-pleasing minutiae, contrasts strongly with Delacroix’s approach in The Sultan of Morocco, where he limited the amount of detail to create an image of great visual force and grandeur.

Amid the tumult and anecdotal detail of The Capture of the Smala, one constant remains: Vernet stressed French domination over Algerians repeatedly.⁶⁸ One way he communicated this message was by showing dead and defeated Arabs, whose bodies are peppered throughout the canvas: piled on top of one another, bleeding and exhausted, trampled beneath the hooves of French horses, and shot at close range (figs. 62 and 63). Vernet also enacted a subtler form of anti-Arab aggression in his depiction of Arab women. On the right side of the canvas, the spires of three palanquins (carriages) jut into the sky, drawing the viewer’s attention to the group of people in and around them (fig. 64). One of the palanquins has tipped over, spilling female passengers from its interior and exposing the once-hidden women as they struggle to keep from tumbling out. Vernet used this imaginary scene as an excuse to reveal the women’s ample rounded breasts and bottoms. The woman seen from behind, for example, wears a white dress whose transparency reveals the dark curving line that separates each fleshy buttock. The soft sole of her bare foot is also visible, adding another titillating detail. Vernet’s decision to eroticize these women amid their plight was an act of sexual and political violence. These women are the wives of Ben Kharoubi, Abd el-Kader’s prime minister, and Vernet was unquestionably aware both of their high status and of the prohibition on Muslim women being seen by men outside their immediate family. Unmasking them in this manner was an attempt to humiliate both the women themselves and the men associated with them. Further, Vernet’s pictorial treatment of the women implies that they are simply another form of booty, like the cattle, to be seized and enjoyed by the conquering French soldiers.

Vernet’s adherence to an account that celebrates the French military is particularly clear in the way that he portrayed the spahis. This special corps of the armée d’Afrique was composed of non-French men of various ethnicities who had joined the French campaign. At the battle of the Smala, the spahis were the first detachment sent to attack the encampment, which placed them on the forefront, where they incurred the most risk. Vernet, however, chose to picture a moment after the French cavalry (and, more important, the Duc d’Aumale) had joined the fray.⁶⁹ He consigns the spahis to the far background in the center, where they can hardly be seen, thereby minimizing their real importance. This choice is all the more striking because the leader of the spahis, a man known as Yusuf, was Vernet’s personal friend.⁷⁰ Given the painting’s official origins and Colonel Yusuf’s status as a Muslim, Vernet’s decision to hide him away in the background is perhaps unsurprising, but their friendship and the fact that Colonel Yusuf was the third highest-ranking French officer at the battle make this choice even more telling. The pictorial invisibility of Colonel Yusuf demonstrates the degree to which this work was intended to be a forceful representation of French military power and its ineluctable triumph over the North Africans. Vernet’s strategy here is precisely the reverse of Delacroix’s. Whereas Delacroix removed the French delegation from his picture in order to produce a purely Moroccan scene, Vernet suppressed the spahis in favor of the French.

Vernet’s pictorial choices in The Capture of the Smala catered cleverly both to Louis-Philippe and to the French army. From the very beginning of the French conquest of Algeria, tension between the government and the military was a constant. For most of the first decade of the July Monarchy, Louis-Philippe’s administration was reluctant to adopt a definitive policy on conquest and colonization. Torn between the procolonization lobby (composed of the army and commercial groups from the southern provinces of France) and those opposed to further engagement in Algeria (mainly economists and groups with humanitarian concerns), the French government dragged its feet until 1840, when Field Marshal Bugeaud’s vision of “total conquest” seemed inevitable. From 1840 to 1844, the “Algerian question” focused increasingly on the extent and organization of colonization, while the issues of conquering the remaining Algerian territories (chiefly Kabylia) and vanquishing the resistance movement were no longer as hotly contested.⁷¹ By glorifying both the leadership of the Duc d’Aumale and the feats of individual French officers in his painting, Vernet smoothed over earlier internal divisions and sought to please Louis-Philippe, the army, and the vast numbers of French men and women who took pride in what they saw as the reborn strength and heroism of the French army.⁷²

fig. 62 | Horace Vernet, The Capture of the Smala of Abd el-Kader, May 16, 1843, center detail of fig. 61.

fig. 63 | Horace Vernet, The Capture of the Smala of Abd el-Kader, May 16, 1843, left detail of fig. 61.

The paintings by Vernet and his ilk celebrate the government’s vision and the military’s view of French imperialism in North Africa, but they were not the only noteworthy interpretations of the French project in Algeria on view at the Salon. Hanging in a gallery not far away from The Sultan of Morocco and The Capture of the Smala, Théodore Chassériau’s monumental Portrait of Ali ben Hamed, Khalifa of Constantine, addressed a different facet of the French presence in Algeria (fig. 65).⁷³ Chassériau portrays the khalifa on horseback, accompanied by five cavalry soldiers. Ali ben Hamed is framed by the Arab and Black men of his guard and by their rifles, which jut out behind him. In keeping with the khalifa’s central position in the painting, his is the most prominent of the horses. Between the beasts’ legs, the white buildings and reddish roofs of the Algerian city of Constantine emerge from the background. Twisted in his saddle to turn toward the picture plane in a three-quarter pose, Ali ben Hamed gazes toward the viewer without establishing eye contact. He rests his right hand on his hip in a gesture of calm authority and uses his left to control with ease his high-tempered steed. Ali ben Hamed’s relaxed yet commanding pose creates an aura of power. Although he wears a turban and a patterned white-and-cream burnous, the khalifa’s garb is not that of the traditional Algerian statesman. Under the burnous, he is clad in a tailored jacket with gold belt and cuffs. Most important, a red-ribboned medal of the Légion d’Honneur is displayed prominently around his neck. This emblem would have fixed him firmly for viewers as an ally of the French, just as his burnous and turban would have established his identity as a North African Arab.

fig. 64 | Horace Vernet, The Capture of the Smala of Abd el-Kader, May 16, 1843, right detail of fig. 61.

fig. 65 | Théodore Chassériau, Portrait of Ali ben Hamed, Khalifa of Constantine, 1845. Oil on canvas, 325 × 260 cm. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

In their accounts of the portrait, Stéphane Guégan and Peter Benson Miller demonstrate that Ali ben Hamed cooperated with the French, turning their campaign in Algeria to his own benefit.⁷⁴ Before the war, Ali ben Hamed was at best a minor figure in the local political hierarchies of Constantine. When the French army tried to capture the city for the second time in 1837, this time successfully, Ali ben Hamed fought alongside them. In return for his loyalty, he was rewarded in 1838 with the title of khalifa and the leadership of the Haractas, a coalition of regional tribes that had opposed the French. The practice of buying the allegiance of local figures was an essential feature of French colonization strategy in Algeria.⁷⁵ Given his apparently obscure status before 1837, it seems reasonable to assume that Ali ben Hamed would not have been able to reach a position of such power had he not allied himself with the French. He was further rewarded for this collaboration during a visit to Paris in 1844, when he was named officer of the Légion d’Honneur. Ali ben Hamed was thus an indisputable ally and supporter of the French in Algeria, but he had also seized the opportunity of war to obtain political power for himself.

If Delacroix’s appropriation of the equestrian leadership portrait to depict a powerful North African leader was innovative, even audacious, Chassériau’s picture was, in some ways, even more daring. Abd er-Rahman was the sultan of Morocco, the heir to the centuries-old Sharifian dynasty. His aristocratic lineage was impeccable, and his command of considerable political power unquestioned. Ali ben Hamed, in contrast, came from an ordinary background and, in 1845, was only a minor regional leader. Further, his accession to power had been entirely the product of his own opportunism and of the colonial ambitions of the French. Some word of Ali ben Hamed’s origins had circulated in Paris during his 1844–45 visit, when the procolonization newspaper L’Algérie remarked, “Rumor has it that the khalifa Ali-Ben-Ba-Ahmed, at the time of the capture of Constantine, was nothing but a simple cavalry soldier.”⁷⁶ Although the journal countered these claims, it still managed to insinuate that they were accurate (and, as we have seen, they probably were). To portray the sultan of Morocco in a manner reserved for the most important and powerful men of France was one thing. To treat Ali ben Hamed similarly was another, because the khalifa was neither a notable political figure nor a distinguished leader. For a young artist like Chassériau, such a gambit suggests that he sought to attract attention to himself. More significant, his portrait conveys a powerful message about the willingness of Algerians to assist the French in the conquest and administration of the colony.

Despite the similarity in subject matter, Delacroix’s portrait differs sharply from Chassériau’s in its ideology. In Algeria, persuading local figures to govern smaller territories on behalf of the French was crucial to the colonization effort because the French lacked the administrative and military resources required to impose their rule without assistance.⁷⁷ Ali ben Hamed was thus a necessary tool for the French mission in Algeria. In contrast, lack of involvement was what the French required from Morocco. To avoid war with France, the sultan agreed in 1844 to close his borders to the leader of the Algerian resistance. While this forced shift in policy may have displeased his subjects and limited his influence in the Maghreb, it did not ultimately change his authority in Morocco. Abd er-Rahman never governed at the pleasure of the French.

The sharp distinction between Delacroix’s The Sultan of Morocco and Chassériau’s Portrait of Ali ben Hamed provides a reminder of the importance of attending to the specific circumstances of each picture’s production and to the allegiances of the artist who created it. In Delacroix’s case, his interpretation of the sultan of Morocco as a powerful, autonomous leader set his painting apart from the others in the Salon exhibition. The contrast between the idea of Moroccan authority in Delacroix’s painting and the broadly (if variously) imperialist views of his compatriots’ pictures reveals the artist’s willingness to challenge the status quo, much as he had done in his Salon paintings of the 1820s. In its grandeur and assertive message, The Sultan of Morocco also marked a triumphant fulfillment of Delacroix’s positive view of Moroccan masculinity.

Chapter 5 Delacroix’s Moroccans After 1845 Memory, Imagination, and Modern Masculinity

Delacroix’s Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage presented to the Salon of 1845 a message of Moroccan sovereignty that differed emphatically from prevailing imperialist views of North Africa (see fig. 51). Like his other paintings of the 1830s and early 1840s, it depicted a scene that was rooted firmly in his experiences during his 1832 trip and reflected his high regard for Moroccan masculinity. The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage acted in some ways as the fullest realization of Delacroix’s positive interpretation of the heroic, admirable traits he saw in Moroccan men and their relevance to history painting. Yet his enthusiasm for images of Moroccan valor never waned: he continued to paint North African subjects for another eighteen years, during which time he produced significantly more than half his paintings with such themes. Despite its significance in Delacroix’s later oeuvre, this body of work has often been either disregarded because of its seeming lack of ethnographic precision or decontextualized by being combined with his earlier works into one monolithic entity.¹ This chapter seeks to complicate such readings by investigating key images and themes from the period between 1845 and 1863 in order to illuminate this vivid and deeply meaningful group of paintings.

Whether they discuss the later works or not, most art historians who have written about Delacroix’s North African paintings mention a particular passage of his journal, in which the artist refers to the Maghreb in his observations about the role of imagination in his painterly practice: “I only began to make something fairly good, in my trip to Africa, when I had sufficiently forgotten the small details so as to remember in my paintings only the striking or poetic aspects.”² Perhaps understandably, this remark has been used as evidence that Delacroix’s later North African paintings are based more on imagination than on observation. Trapp was one of the first to propose that Delacroix’s interest in accuracy had disappeared by the 1850s.³ O’Brien suggests that these pictures “provided less an ethnography of Morocco than a sort of imaginary escape from France” that was part of a broader rejection of modernity in Delacroix’s work as a whole during the 1850s.⁴ More provocatively, Grigsby characterizes Delacroix’s later North African works as an indistinguishable mass of picturesque Orientalist scenes that lack any evidence of the pictorial experimentation and moral tension associated with his early history paintings.⁵ French scholars offer more neutral interpretations: Barthélémy Jobert maintains that Delacroix’s later works never lost their grounding in reality but sought to communicate larger truths, while Sébastien Allard and Côme Fabre contend that Delacroix abandoned iconographic unity in several of his later North African paintings.⁶ With few exceptions, most of these interpretations underestimate or even dismiss the significance of Delacroix’s later North African works. Rather than foreclosing the question of imagination’s role in these paintings, it is important to investigate Delacroix’s claim about memory further by examining the ways in which he negotiated between his experiences on the 1832 trip and his later ambitions for his work.

In his paintings of Morocco in the 1830s and early 1840s, Delacroix explored an autonomous, chivalrous masculinity that is as capable of dignified composure as it is of passionate energy. This thematic pursuit grew out of his commitment to history painting and its demand for a strong protagonist, which Delacroix had often represented as an antiheroic or ambivalent figure in the earlier years of his career.⁷ These concerns had been critical to the post-Revolutionary and post-Davidian sensibilities of French artists in the second two decades of the nineteenth century, but over the course of the July Monarchy, they gradually diminished, and new issues began to preoccupy French painters, including the advent of Realism, the democratization of the Salons, and a meaningful shift in the market for paintings. The latter occurred as a result of the intertwined declines of government patronage and large-scale history painting, along with the concomitant rise of bourgeois patronage, the dealer-critic system, and the subjects these groups favored (particularly genre and landscape).⁸ The emergence of photography and other new technologies had a significant impact on the arts, as did the growing urbanization and industrialization of France and the phenomenon of modernity.⁹ Additionally, the enduring might of the Moroccan military became increasingly uncertain after 1844. Thus the context in which Delacroix composed his North African paintings after The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage had changed fairly dramatically from that of the 1830s and early 1840s. During the second half of his career, Delacroix remained deeply committed to history painting, but he directed his energies away from large-scale easel painting toward mural projects, on the one hand, and smaller, more intimate (and market-ready) canvases, on the other.¹⁰ Taking these developments into account, my investigation of Delacroix’s later Moroccan pictures will show how he continued his earlier exploration of heroic masculinity at the same time that he transformed his work to address the demands of a new era and his own shifting artistic ambitions.

Against Realism

Before beginning our examination of Delacroix’s later images of Moroccan men, it is imperative to understand that his famous quote has typically been taken out of context. When he noted that he “only began to make something fairly good, in my trip to Africa, when I had sufficiently forgotten the small details,” Delacroix was not thinking about his Moroccan works per se. In fact, his statement appears in a passage of his journal that has little to do with the Maghreb: he wrote these words while musing on what he describes as “the use of the model and on imitation.”¹¹ Delacroix was at his cottage in the rural hamlet of Champrosay when he wrote this and several related entries in his journal in the fall of 1853, and on the day in question, his thoughts centered on memory. After reflecting on his appreciation for the pleasurable tranquility offered by the outdoors, he copied a letter he had written to his friend Achille Piron, in which he extols the restorative aspects of spending time in nature, away from the city. This paean to nature is followed in his journal by a discussion of the model, which begins with a reinterpretation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s observation that one appreciates the countryside more when one remembers its beauty from the distance of the city.¹² Delacroix then turned to the need for some degree of detachment to make good paintings:

Immersed in nature, surrounded by trees and charming spots, my landscape painting is heavy, overdone, perhaps truer in the details, but out of harmony with the subject. When Courbet made the background for the woman who bathes [The Bathers; Paris, Musée d’Orsay], he copied it scrupulously from a study that I saw beside his easel. Nothing is colder; it is a work of marquetry.—I only began to make something fairly good, in my trip to Africa, when I had sufficiently forgotten the small details so as to remember in my paintings only the striking or poetic aspects; until then, I was pursued by the love of exactitude, which most people take for the truth.¹³

Delacroix offers no date for his abandonment of the pursuit of precision nor does he account for the incongruity between the involuntary act of forgetting and the deliberate quest for factuality. Regardless of this inconsistency, he aims unmistakably to critique realism both for its precise imitation of the model and, through his literary use of the term “marquetry,” for its patchwork quality, its lack of “harmony with the subject.”

Delacroix’s thoughts about the need for forgetfulness belonged to a series of critiques of what he called realism in his writings from the late 1840s and 1850s. In using the term realism, Delacroix did not limit himself to the style of landscape painting embraced by Courbet. Rather, he was equally concerned with the contemporary taste for polished, quasi-photographic lifelikeness in French painting.¹⁴ Realism was one of the first issues he addressed when he took up his journal again in January 1847, which suggests he had been pondering it for some time.¹⁵ He introduced it as a discussion of the problems of adhering to the model, and he later went on to characterize it as a conflict between imitation and imagination or as an effort to find a balance between relying on the model and using inner vision as a guide. If, in 1847, Delacroix speculated that great painting could not be made without relying on the model, by 1849, he was closer to embracing the claim that “there is more to painting than exactitude and precise rendering after the model.”¹⁶ Not long after, in 1850, he pushed this notion further, arguing that “cold exactitude is not art.”¹⁷ In 1853, he arrived at the conclusion that “the independence of the imagination must be uncompromised in front of the painting.”¹⁸ By 1857, as Hannoosh notes, his attitude had evolved to a belief that overreliance on the model was a huge shortcoming in a painter and bore the responsibility for the inferiority of contemporary French painting.¹⁹ Resituating Delacroix’s 1853 statement in its original contexts of the specific journal entry and the ongoing reflections about realism of which it was a part shows that when he said he had “forgotten enough small details,” he meant that he had abandoned his attempts to reproduce the setting closely in order to liberate the imagination and focus on a larger truth, just as Jobert suggests. He surely did not mean that he had forgotten or chosen to ignore the details of the Moroccan trip, as other critics may have implied. To the contrary, his words indicate that his later paintings of North Africa became a kind of testing ground for his theories about memory and imitation.

For Delacroix in his later years, the imbrication of his recollections of his trip to Morocco with his ideas about memory and representation emerged in both paintings and writings. In a page of notes dated to around 1844, for example, he invoked Morocco in his reflections about time’s impact on memory: “We are astonished by the annihilation that death brings, by [our] profound forgetting of those who exist no longer.—We even forget ourselves. I see my drawings of Morocco again—my impressions are those of another; a thousand details that have slipped away, and that sometimes almost come back, prove it to me.—The memory we think we have is deceptive.—Portraits of the dead made after death soon seem like good likenesses, because the imagination, which has nothing but vague memories, takes to this reality right away.”²⁰ Memory cannot be trusted to provide an accurate account of the past, yet the past is dead, and its truth cannot be resuscitated. If we examine Delacroix’s later Moroccan pictures with his views on memory and realism in mind, we encounter a productive and even provocative dialogue between past and present, between Morocco as seen by Delacroix in 1832 and Morocco as remembered by him in the 1850s, inflected not only by the erosion of forgetting but also by current political realities and aesthetic demands.

Heroic Masculinity and the Moroccan Cavalry

Much like his earlier works, Delacroix’s Moroccan paintings after 1845 focus on the energetic agency and self-possessed autonomy of men in their roles as soldiers, leaders, and equestrians, but he also began to use these pictures to experiment with his theories about memory and imagination. The 1858 painting Moroccan Troops Fording a River offers a powerful example of the balance Delacroix struck between the model and his memory of it, between the demands of accuracy and the need for pictorial harmony (fig. 66). In the painting, Delacroix returned to the subject of the Moroccan cavalry in a striking, zigzag composition full of rich color harmonies. In the right foreground, a soldier wades through the river, twisting his head and torso away from the viewer to look back at his companions. The line of his rifle, slung across his shoulder, directs the viewer’s eye back and to the left, where another man on horseback enters the stream from the riverbank. More mounted cavalrymen follow this figure, who is presumably the leader of the troop. On the far right, in the middle distance, another soldier on horseback prepares to climb out of the river onto the opposite bank, followed further back by three more riders who are midstream in the near background. A gently sloping green hill abuts the river to the right while tawny mountains rise dramatically in the background and to the left. The sun—rising or setting—reddens the clouds that streak across a brilliant blue sky. Its rays strike the figures as they cross, leaving much of what we see in shadow.

fig. 66 | Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Troops Fording a River, 1858. Oil on canvas, 60 × 75 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

Although he did not paint it until the late 1850s, Delacroix had developed the idea for Moroccan Troops Fording a River in 1832. In a list of subjects compiled in the latter part of that year, he made note of a “river crossing, taking all the figures as they appear in my sketches.”²¹ Just below, he jotted down a pair of phrases: “the camp in the morning on the riverbank” and “the banks of the River Erdem [Rdom].” Perhaps surprisingly, none of the known drawings from the trip look much like Moroccan Troops Fording a River.²² Several of Delacroix’s sketches of Moroccan men on horseback and of the Rif and Atlas mountains (seen during the trips between Tangier and Meknes) show parallels with the painting, but none of them correlate precisely with it (figs. 42, 43, and 47). This lack of resemblance, however, is the very thing that makes the picture an ideal test case for our queries about the role of imagination in Delacroix’s later pictures.

During the journeys to and from Meknes in 1832, Delacroix and the diplomatic delegation crossed numerous streams and rivers, and the artist’s sketches from these events offer a pictorial record against which Moroccan Troops Fording a River can be evaluated. Based on the geography of the region and the information in Delacroix’s 1832 notes, we can determine that the inspiration for the setting is probably one of the small rivers near the villages of Sidi Kacem and Zerhoun, not far from Meknes. After the delegation departed from Sidi Kacem and made for Zerhoun on March 14, Delacroix recorded several encounters with waterways. The first occurred early in the day: “Left in the morning in beautiful sunshine. Went along the little river [Rdom] at first. The figures lit on the side by the rising sun. Mountains crisp against the background. White fabrics and very bright colors. Blue sky.”²³ The language of this note seems to find an echo in Moroccan Troops Fording a River and in Delacroix’s 1832 list of subjects for painting (“the camp in the morning on the riverbank” and “the banks of the River Erdem [Rdom]).” But while the description sounds like what we see in the painting, the accompanying drawing in the sketchbook shows a line of soldiers riding slowly above and beside a river, rather than crossing it, and the mountains also look quite different (fig. 67). Further complicating the association between painting and drawing, Moroccan Troops Fording a River was described as a sunset rather than a sunrise scene when it was offered at the posthumous sale of its first owner in 1870.²⁴

fig. 67 | Eugène Delacroix, Sketches from the Trip to Meknes, 1832. Graphite, 19.3 × 12.7 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Album RF 1712bis, fol. 15r. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

Two additional entries from the same sketchbook present similarly equivocal source material. In another note and drawing from later that same March day, Delacroix reported crossing a second small river (the Khoumân) and made a sketch at the bottom of the page showing horsemen walking across a very shallow stream (fig. 68).²⁵ Among the extant drawings from the 1832 trip to Meknes, this sketch looks most like the 1858 painting, but there are numerous clear differences. The background mountains have been moved closer to the foreground in the painting, and the direction of the figures’ movement has been reversed, along with the gentle slope at the left of the sketch, which rises to the right in the painting. The sketch’s shallow, laurel-shaded stream has been transformed in the painting into a deeper river framed by grassy banks. Another sketch, made the next day, depicts a second crossing of the Khoumân, this time in the mountains just outside Meknes (fig. 69). Although none of the figures resemble those seen in the painting, the low perspective and the flat river framed by a jutting mountain are similar to the landscape represented in Moroccan Troops Fording a River. These sketches, each containing some element that found its way into the final painting, suggest conscious editing rather than the fuzzy hybridizations produced by memory. In spite of the absence of a unified visual referent, the subject of Moroccan Troops Fording a River is undoubtedly based on events that took place during the Meknes trip, and its distillation of several moments into one elucidates the process by which Delacroix fused memory, imagination, and documentation in his later works.

fig. 68 | Eugène Delacroix, Sketches from the Trip to Meknes, 1832. Graphite, 19.3 × 12.7 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Album RF 1712bis, fol. 15v. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

fig. 69 | Eugène Delacroix, Sketches from the Trip to Meknes, 1832. Graphite and watercolor, each page 19.3 × 12.7 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Album RF 1712bis, fol. 16v–17r. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

Delacroix’s choice of subject for the painting also reveals his decision to elevate certain memories over others. Though the presence of the guard wading across the river on foot suggests a certain degree of vigilance, the scene is a peaceful one. This narrative calm is noteworthy partly because there were a number of livelier 1832 river crossings Delacroix could have painted instead. On several occasions during the Meknes trip, the delegation entered new territory upon fording a river and were therefore greeted by a welcoming committee from the local pasha, under orders from Sultan Abd er-Rahman.²⁶ With his characteristic wry humor, Delacroix describes one of these events in a letter to friends back in Paris: “Each provincial governor handed us over to the next one, and our escort, already very considerable, increased by the guard of these newcomers. From time to time we would hear a few stray bullets whistling in the midst of the rejoicing. We had among others a river crossing—without bridges or boats, of course—that can be compared to the crossing of the Rhine in the amount of gunfire that welcomed us.”²⁷ At another river on the return trip to Tangier, the group had to contend with a particularly unwieldy gift given by the sultan to King Louis-Philippe: an ostrich that had to be put on the back of a horse in order to traverse the river.²⁸ One can only imagine the complicated logistics of such a pairing. Perhaps the most stressful crossing was that of the deep, swift river Sebou. Due to the absence of bridges, the soldiers had to construct makeshift rafts. Using them, however, proved difficult because the horses—the delegation had more than a hundred—protested mightily at the prospect of boarding the rafts.²⁹

Instead of focusing on one of these rather undignified but doubtless more memorable events, Moroccan Troops Fording a River draws on several of the quieter crossings. In fact, even when he did make a painting that references the chaotic fording of the Sebou, Delacroix excised the rafts altogether, underscoring the degree to which he deliberately reshaped his memories (fig. 70). In Moroccan Horsemen by the River Sebou (ca. 1855), Delacroix focused on the landscape, pulling the viewpoint back sharply.³⁰ While a substantial number of tiny cavalry soldiers approach the river, much as they did in 1832, the rafts, with their promise of farcical equine consternation, are nowhere to be seen. Much like Moroccan Troops Fording a River, the Sebou painting reveals the ways in which Delacroix refined memory and gave greater rein to imagination in his later North African pictures.

fig. 70 | Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Horsemen by the River Sebou, ca. 1855. Oil on canvas, 27 × 37 cm. Private collection; formerly with The Matthiesen Gallery. Photo © The Matthiesen Gallery, London.

In Moroccan Troops Fording a River, Delacroix melded several sketches (or perhaps memories of these sites) to revisit the concept of dignified leadership that he had explored in earlier paintings, like Moroccan Chieftain Receiving Tribute and The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage (see figs. 48 and 51).³¹ As in his 1832 painting of the courses de poudre, the leader of the troop in Moroccan Troops Fording a River is presumably inspired by Abd el-Malek, Commander of the Royal Cavalry (see fig. 38). The man wears an ecru burnous over a bright azure djellaba, and his head pierces the line of the distant mountains as he urges his bay roan into the river. The stately image of confident leadership and alert serenity Delacroix represents in the soldiers in the painting echoes the powerful, self-contained agency he privileged in his evocations, during the 1830s and 1840s, of ancient Roman senators as tropes of Moroccan masculinity. The fact that Delacroix chose to depict the soldiers this way in Moroccan Troops Fording a River reveals both his continued delight in focusing on the aspects of Moroccan society that he found admirable and his later practice of editing his memories to maintain this vision.

In this painting, Delacroix remained committed to the mode of calm, authoritative self-possession that had characterized his earlier images of Moroccan soldiers and leaders. But there are other pictures that show that he also retained his fascination with the intense action and dramatic movement that he had explored in his paintings of the courses de poudre from the 1830s. There are, however, some noteworthy differences between the earlier and later paintings of soldiers on horseback that signal an alteration in Delacroix’s pictorial agenda and attest to his efforts to let imagination blur the edges of his memories. In his last painting of the courses de poudre (Arab Cavalry Practicing a Charge; 1847), for example, Delacroix depicts a string of horsemen galloping vigorously across the front of the picture plane rather than riding together in distinct rows as they did in the early paintings (fig. 71; see also figs. 1 and 38). Whereas dexterity and discipline had dominated the earlier images, Delacroix privileges the sensation of speed in the later painting: the riders thunder across the picture plane individually, hurtling out of a frame that crops the body of one of the horses on the left. The beasts’ flashing legs lift them above the ground, twisting them into anatomically unlikely poses as their manes and tails stream out behind them. Instead of performing military exercises, the cavalrymen atop these steeds are engaged in a different, more nebulous activity, perhaps charging to the scene of battle or rushing to the aid of someone in need. Delacroix shifted his attention here from the order and mastery of group military drills to the fruits of that practice, the actions for which such rehearsals prepared the soldiers.

fig. 71 | Eugène Delacroix, Arab Cavalry Practicing a Charge, 1847. Oil on canvas, 66 × 82 cm. Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz,” Winterthur. Photo courtesy of the Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz.”

Another major change in Delacroix’s later depictions of Moroccan soldiers consists of a movement away from the cavalry as a group toward pictures of individual men and their horses. Some of these paintings return to a theme that he had explored in the 1820s with Turks and their steeds. Moroccan Mounting His Horse (1854; Bern, private collection) and Moroccan Saddling His Horse (1855; fig. 72) both hearken back to Delacroix’s 1824 lithographs of a Turk working with his steed (see fig. 13). While there are many drawings of Moroccan men and their horses from the 1832 trip, these paintings blend the two sources: eyewitness sketches meld with 1820s imagery. In other paintings, we see individual men galloping through the countryside, signaling to distant companions or crossing rivers amid gunfire.³² There is often a hint of danger that occasionally erupts into armed conflict, but these are not battle paintings, nor, of course, are they paintings of soldiers performing military exercises. In Arab Chieftain Signaling to His Companions (1851), for example, Delacroix created a vivid scene with an economy of pictorial means (fig. 73).³³ On a narrow track that winds through steep, mountainous terrain, a Moroccan horseman twists backward in his saddle to wave at two riders whose tiny scale emphasizes the great distance between them. Delacroix enlivens the setting by using what amounts to a trademark of these pictures: a billowing garment (here a red burnous) and an athletic pose, both of which intensify the dynamism of the image. The movements of the two distant riders also create a sense of urgency: the splayed limbs of their horses demonstrate that they are galloping at breakneck speed. The abandoned gunpowder pouch at the right corner provides a narrative clue: the gesturing rider and his companions may have been tracking someone, perhaps an enemy or a missing comrade, and have just discovered the pouch as evidence to his whereabouts. The absence of the long rifle carried by Moroccan cavalrymen suggests either that the men are not soldiers or that this is an example of Delacroix’s forgetting of “small details.”

fig. 72 | Eugène Delacroix, Moroccan Saddling His Horse, 1855. Oil on canvas, 56 × 47 cm. Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Photo: HIP / Art Resource, New York.

fig. 73 | Eugène Delacroix, Arab Chieftain Signaling to His Companions, 1851. Oil on canvas, 55.9 × 46 cm. Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virigina. Photo © Josse / Bridgeman Images.

In paintings like these, Delacroix continued to focus on the active, passionate mode of masculinity that he had admired in the 1830s, but he made it more private and individualized, both in subject and in scale. The paintings of single men and horses are all small, each roughly twenty-two by eighteen inches.³⁴ The diminutive size of these canvases and their consistent themes meant that they could be painted relatively quickly and easily, and given that Delacroix was simultaneously struggling with chronic illness and working on several major mural projects throughout the 1850s, this factor might have contributed to their appeal.³⁵ His preference for a more intimate theme and smaller size of canvas may also reflect an even more prosaic reality: the demands of the art market. All eight paintings of solitary North African men and their horses executed after 1845 passed quickly from the studio into the hands of private collectors, most of whom sold them again within ten years. Delacroix also painted scenes inspired by his trip to North Africa for dealers throughout the 1850s, and he sold one dealer several small pictures of Arab men hunting lions and tigers.³⁶

While convenience and market concerns may have informed Delacroix’s decision to begin focusing on individual men and their horses rather than on the cavalry itself, closer investigation shows that his continued attention to the theme was also fueled by his ideas about modern warfare and modernity generally. O’Brien points out that Delacroix’s journal entries from this period express hostility toward certain aspects of modernization; he argues further that pictures like these explore a “selective vision of North Africa”: “The image of Moroccan life in the late work—rugged, natural, unaffected, impulsive—answers [Delacroix’s] critique of modern, European civilization as artificial, banal, debased, and corrupt.”³⁷ The latter certainly seems to describe Delacroix’s views of the modern French military. As we saw in chapters 1 and 3, Delacroix had mixed, even negative, feelings about French soldiers during the 1820s and 1830s, and he was hardly alone, as the institution of the army had lost much of its luster for many Frenchmen by midcentury.³⁸

Delacroix’s ambivalence crystallized into outright criticism in 1854, at the beginning of the Crimean War, and the text he wrote on this occasion elucidates the significance of his small pictures of Moroccan men and their horses. One day, after watching French soldiers at target practice, Delacroix felt moved to repudiate contemporary warfare at length. Describing his feelings as “disdain mixed with indignation,” he refers to the soldiers he had seen as “brutes,” “sheep dressed as wolves,” and “automatons.” He reproaches troop leaders in particular: “Where is the strength, where is the skill in this stupid game; the strength to attack, harry, and defeat a fierce enemy, the dexterity to protect oneself from his shots? What, you come and put yourself in front of another animal just as intimidated as you are, and at a reasonable distance you calmly fire bullets of lead and iron, without a single defense against the shots that are fired back at you, and you persuade your be-plumed, epauletted herd that this brings glory!”³⁹ Calling this approach too passive and wasteful of bravery, Delacroix argues that heroism, in contrast, “consists of approaching the enemy in such a way that personal courage would serve a useful purpose.”⁴⁰ For him, the modern army’s “only strength” is in numbers, but “the courage of men of action becomes almost useless there.” Instead of these masses of automatons, Delacroix proposes another model consisting of “infantrymen gathered in small platoons only, expert marksmen, but also [expert at] reassembling promptly to attack furiously and from close quarters.” Such units, he continues, “would have a greater effect than these walls of flesh that fire these rapid, inaccurate shots at random and from far away.”⁴¹ Seen in this context, Delacroix’s paintings of individual Moroccan soldiers in the 1850s are more than just a response to market forces: they reflect his disaffection with the French military and his enduring belief in the heroism of Moroccan masculinity. His memory of the Moroccan cavalry as he experienced it in 1832 resembled closely the ideal he described in 1854. Delacroix’s tendency to focus on single figures and small platoons in the 1850s should be understood as a pictorial exploration of his belief that “personal courage” is best expressed in such a setting.

While it may seem surprising that Delacroix did not refer to Morocco at all in his 1854 discussion of modern warfare, he may not have done so because of his awareness of the Moroccan military’s relative fragility after the battle of Isly in 1844 and lack of effectiveness against incursions by Spanish forces in the 1850s.⁴² Though Delacroix had provided a resounding rebuttal to French insinuations of Moroccan weakness in The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, the events of Isly had revealed internal disarray in the sultan’s administration and major vulnerabilities in his army. It is thus tempting to interpret Delacroix’s paintings of individual men and horses in the 1850s, rather than the larger troops of the 1830s, as revelations of a loss of faith in the collective body of the Moroccan cavalry after Isly. Yet the internal challenges Morocco faced with its military were caused not by the absence of heroic fighters but by the lack of a centralized authority structure mobilizing large platoons of soldiers—precisely the form Delacroix derided in 1854.⁴³ His analysis of the army as an institution conflicts with the evidence of real-world events, at least in the case of Morocco.

Despite this seeming contradiction, Delacroix’s awareness of Moroccan military problems may have informed one element of his 1854 critique of modern French warfare, in which he found fault with the cavalry as an institution, arguing that it was “good only for maintaining ground on the battlefield, reconnoitering territory, harrying, or following an already defeated, fleeing enemy and preventing him from returning.”⁴⁴ Delacroix’s paintings of individual Moroccan men and their horses, when examined closely, often feature precisely the kinds of actions he describes here: reconnaissance and pursuit. With their emphasis on the types of battle that Delacroix found heroic, these pictures become a kind of ideal that compensated for what he perceived as an absence of effective courage and action in the French army. By focusing on individual riders as opposed to troops, he also detached his paintings from the grim realities facing the Moroccan military. Moroccan Troops Fording a River and the images of individual horsemen show that Delacroix allowed imagination to wield a greater influence over the subjects of his later Moroccan paintings than those of his earlier ones. Rather than relegating him to the territory of Orientalist fantasy, however, this use of the imagination enabled him to engage more emphatically with the moral qualities of valor and courage that had so impressed him in 1832.

Invented Masculinities

Delacroix’s sustained engagement with the pictorial lineaments of heroism can also be found in paintings that constitute wholesale fabrications, even though they were inspired by his Moroccan sojourn. The shift in Delacroix’s attention to a less descriptive approach that foregrounded the power of the imagination is nowhere more evident than in a series of Moroccan-inflected genre paintings he produced in the late 1840s and 1850s. Several of these featured scenes that find no source either in his 1832 sketchbooks and letters or in his 1843 manuscript and notes for a North African memoir. Perhaps the best-known pictures from this group are paintings of Arab and Turkish men hunting lions, a theme that emerged from Delacroix’s renewed fascination, starting in the mid-1840s, with large cats.⁴⁵ Within this group, the most famous is the epic Lion Hunt, a hybrid of history painting and genre painting that Delacroix produced for the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris (fig. 74). Apart from these mild iconographic affinities, the relationship between the hunt pictures and Delacroix’s North African oeuvre is frankly tenuous at best, and a detailed discussion is outside the parameters of this study. In addition to the fact that neither Delacroix nor his companions ever noted hunts of any kind while in North Africa in 1832, Lion Hunt and its cognates closely emulate the work of Rubens.⁴⁶ Furthermore, Lion Hunt is geographically untethered: the landscape looks more French than North African, and the figures wear culturally nonspecific dress. For the most part, the men wear clothing that Delacroix understood as Turkish, with a few Moroccan elements in the footwear and turbans.⁴⁷ Nevertheless, the wholesale invention of subject matter in the hunt paintings shows the degree to which Delacroix prized the faculty of imagination during this period, and these pictures also extend to a broader narrative realm Delacroix’s vision of Moroccan masculinity as vigorous, courageous, and nourished by time spent outdoors.

fig. 74 | Eugène Delacroix, Lion Hunt, 1855. Oil on canvas, 173 × 361 cm (originally 260 × 361 cm). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

Although it is often overlooked, Delacroix exhibited a second new painting at the 1855 Exposition that showed a similar degree of invention to Lion Hunt, but this picture embraces his interpretation of the quieter side of Moroccan masculinity. The Riding Lesson (1854), with its focus on a seemingly sentimental family group, offers a compelling example of Delacroix’s continued fascination with this aspect of manliness (fig. 75). In a verdant mountain landscape, we see a young boy, still a toddler, balancing precariously on the back of a sorrel horse.⁴⁸ The child lifts his arms in a mixture of fear and delight, while his father steadies him with one hand and holds the horse’s reins with the other. In the right middle ground, a woman and a white-bearded man, presumably the mother and grandfather of the child, watch this rite of passage together. The horse shows less patience than one might like to see when such a small child is involved: it stretches its neck forward and swishes its tail energetically. One is reminded of Delacroix’s 1832 claim that even the tamest Moroccan horses were “devils” to ride.⁴⁹ A saddle in the right foreground projects the viewer into the future, when the boy will be old enough to use it. Although the locale is rural, this family is probably not meant to be nomadic, like the figures in Horace Vernet’s Arab Tale-Teller (see fig. 35). The father wears slippers and a fine blue djellaba, both consistent with urban rather than rural dress.⁵⁰ Given the presence of the tent in the right middle ground and the absence of pastoral signifiers like sheep, this painting suggests a scene of travel, a theme Delacroix would return to a year later in Arabs Traveling (1855; Providence, RISD Museum). The white buildings of a city in the left distance intimate a possible point of departure or destination for the painting’s protagonists. Taking these factors into consideration, The Riding Lesson can be interpreted as an image of a family engaging in educational play at the end of a day of travel.

fig. 75 | Eugène Delacroix, The Riding Lesson, 1854. Oil on canvas, 64 × 81 cm. Private collection. Photo: Painters / Alamy Stock Photo.

Unlike his images of the Moroccan cavalry, which were still grounded in lived experience, The Riding Lesson is an invented scene that speaks more to Delacroix’s interests in 1855 than to anything he observed in Morocco. There are no known notes or sketches for the 1832 trip that document such a subject, nor are there any third-party accounts that make reference to it, as there were for Convulsionists of Tangier (1838; fig. 29) and Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834; Paris, Musée du Louvre).⁵¹ Johnson suggests that Delacroix’s inspiration for the painting goes back to 1825, when the artist noted seeing a picture with a similar theme during his trip to England.⁵² Delacroix may well have remembered this subject and resurrected it in a Moroccan context. Apart from any direct observation, The Riding Lesson also reflects contemporary French beliefs about equine practices among Arab peoples. Lamartine argued in 1835 that horses were treated like members of the family in the Arab world.⁵³ In 1851, Eugène Daumas reported in his portion of the book Chevaux du Sahara (Horses of the Sahara), cowritten with former Algerian resistance leader Abd el-Kader, that Algerian Arabs familiarized their children with horses from a very young age: “As soon as a child can sit upright on a horse, it is mounted first on yearlings, then on [full-grown] horses.”⁵⁴ While Delacroix never mentioned Chevaux du Sahara specifically, he may still have been aware of this claim. By depicting a boy who appears to be roughly three years old, Delacroix underscores the early age at which Arab men (here Moroccan as opposed to Algerian) allegedly learned to ride horses. In so doing, he may have been responding to current French interpretations of North African cultures. This approach is consistent with his representation of Moroccans before 1845 and echoes his beliefs that Moroccan men were more purely men than Frenchmen were. Along with the benefits of an excellent climate and free access to nature, horsemanship struck Delacroix as a central element of the rugged masculinity he admired in Moroccans, as we saw in chapter 3. Here, he envisions equestrian skill as a cultural legacy passed from one generation to the next.

Critics who wrote about The Riding Lesson when it was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 responded enthusiastically to its emphasis on family bonds. Paul Mantz, for one, praised the gentleness of the scene: “The patient beast takes part with distracted affability in these efforts at precocious horsemanship, which a woman, in the background, considers with a tenderness made of disquiet and joy.”⁵⁵ Using language that echoes Mantz’s closely but with a satirical edge, Gautier called it an example of “sweet” ideas, admiring “the deeply delighted air of the urchin, the grave satisfaction of the father, the intelligent affability of the noble animal who seems to take part in this banter.”⁵⁶ Like Mantz, Pierre Petroz approved of the peaceful subject (and traditional gender norms) displayed in Delacroix’s painting, which he calls a “naive scene”: “The simplicity of effect gives to this canvas a beautifully felt patriarchal character. . . . The mother and the grandfather . . . observe this first lesson with tender solicitude.”⁵⁷ The critics thus interpreted The Riding Lesson as a touching image of domestic life in Morocco and projected their own notions of family and gender roles onto it.

The sentimental response of the critics, however, is not necessarily reflective of Delacroix’s aims for this painting. While working on The Riding Lesson in June 1854, he complained bitterly about the sad state of social relations in his day and the way that the self-seeking ambitions of his fellow humans had destroyed the family. As he put it in his journal:

What was called the family is today a vain word. The elimination, in our morals, of veneration, [or] even fear, of the father by the familiarity permitted by customs is the main solvent. The [law of] equal distribution [among heirs] succeeds in dissolving all the ties that unite the members of a family. The place of birth, the paternal dwelling, is naturally lost after the death of the father. We sacrifice, it is said, to other gods: the good of humanity has become the passion of all those who cannot live with their brothers, [made] from the same blood from which they are formed.⁵⁸

In this lament for the abandonment of patriarchal values in favor of more socialist ones, Delacroix refers to Napoleon’s Civil Code, which had abolished wills and primogeniture and replaced them with a law requiring that inheritances be distributed equally among male and female heirs.⁵⁹ While the immediate provocation for Delacroix’s rancor against this long-established law is unknown, it shares something in common with his other critiques of contemporary life that Hannoosh and O’Brien explore.⁶⁰ On a more personal level, Delacroix may have believed that the law had caused or at least contributed to the painful fighting between his siblings that eventually damaged his own family relations beyond repair. After the death of Delacroix’s mother in 1814, he and his two siblings, Henriette and Charles, inherited a parcel of forested land. Henriette’s husband, Raymond de Verninac, persuaded the artist and his brother to sign over their rights to him in exchange for yearly payments. Unfortunately, Verninac never made good on the payments, which prompted Charles to file a lawsuit. Matters worsened after Verninac died in 1822, and though Delacroix tried first to mediate between and then to reconcile his older siblings, his efforts never succeeded; Henriette died in 1827 still estranged from Charles.⁶¹ In contrast to the disappearing bonds within French families, including his own, the multigenerational Moroccan family in Delacroix’s The Riding Lesson interacts happily. As precious as land, the inheritance here is cultural: the adult man passes on the legacy of horsemanship to his young son, as it was presumably passed on to him by his father, who watches this transmission of knowledge approvingly.

Delacroix also stressed the power of place through the gorgeous landscape that surrounds the figures. Notably, this scene of traditional family harmony takes place in the Moroccan countryside, not in the city, as evidenced by the sweeping mountain vista and the tent behind the woman and the old man. A reclining man in the background both guards the family group and enjoys the visual pleasure of the stunning view spread before him. While staying in the countryside near Malesherbes just a month before he reported working on the painting, Delacroix had remarked upon the merit “in a time of decadence, of returning to simplicity and nature.”⁶² This picture, with its “patriarchal character,” situates the family in nature, amid the rolling hills near the Atlas. The Riding Lesson also bears witness to Delacroix’s growing interest in landscape and its emotive powers. While he never embraced landscape painting for its own sake, his interest in depicting the natural world went well beyond the function of landscape as a mere backdrop for the action of the painting.⁶³ In his so-called Pyrénées sketchbook, for example, Delacroix devoted many pages to studies of the spectacular mountain landscape near Eaux-les-Bonnes, where he spent three weeks in 1845 to improve his health.⁶⁴ In the months and years immediately surrounding his production of The Riding Lesson, Delacroix would spend more time visiting the distant cousins who were all the family that remained to him, always sketching the landscapes nearby. On his way to a cousin’s home near Malesherbes in May 1854, Delacroix reveled in the beautiful countryside, which, he noted, “recalled to me youth and happy times.”⁶⁵ Such sentiments may tempt us to see The Riding Lesson as a reflexive rejection of modernity, but the painting acts more precisely as both a personal reflection on, and a reminder to French audiences of, the importance of preserving cultural and geographical patrimony under the pressures of rapid industrialization and urbanization.

Shapely Beasts, or “Cold Exactitude Is Not Art”

If Delacroix experimented with rejecting realism to the extent of fabricating subjects for the 1855 Exposition, by the time he executed Moroccan Troops Fording a River in 1858, he had redirected his attention to exploring the balance between imagination and observed reality, all the while retaining his commitment to the theme of the heroism of Moroccan men and the horses who were their steadfast companions. As we saw earlier in his 1854 critique of the French army, Delacroix found fault with the cavalry as an effective fighting force. While this seems surprising given his admiration for the Moroccan cavalry in the 1830s, his attitude toward horses in that same piece of writing is even more shocking. In addition to disparaging the cavalry, Delacroix criticizes horses themselves, arguing that they were unsuited to war, “difficult to feed and preserve,” and an outright nuisance and liability in the heat of battle.⁶⁶ This negative judgment of the role of horses in warfare stands in stark contrast to his many paintings of horses in European battle scenes and, of course, to his images of the Moroccan courses de poudre from the 1830s and 1840s. Despite his critique of the function of horses in contemporary battle, however, he remained committed to their significance in art.

Echoing his critique of realism and claims for the primacy of the imagination, Delacroix’s spirited praise for horses in painting departed sharply from his harsh assessment of their place on the battlefield. In an 1848 article on Gros published in the Revue des deux mondes, Delacroix singled out the 1806 Battle of Aboukir for commendation and paid special attention to Gros’s depiction of horses (see fig. 5). In Delacroix’s view, Gros’s horses surpass those of all other artists, even Rubens. While Delacroix credits Rubens with extraordinary depictive powers and praises the burning, heroic life and gorgeous energy of his steeds, he nevertheless finds Gros to be the master: “[Rubens’s horses] do not have the nobility, nor, I would dare say, the passion of Gros’s horses. These, like their riders, seem to breathe the love of danger and glory. In these mêlées, so poetic, where one sees them rear, bite, neigh, where the breasts clash, where the mixed and intertwined manes shine beneath the brightest sun through the dust of combat, one still admires the science with which the painter drew them, and the beauty of their proportions. This blend, so rare, of strength and elegance is undoubtedly the highest limit of art.”⁶⁷ Gros’s ability to combine accurate equine anatomy with seething passion and energy inspired Delacroix to lavish praise. Although he eschewed such precision in his own images, Delacroix sought to recreate Gros’s pictorial ethos in his later paintings of horses. As I shall demonstrate, Delacroix continued to embrace horses (and Moroccan barbs in particular) as excellent subjects for painting, despite his 1854 critique of their role in warfare.

Delacroix’s enduring enthusiasm for horses or, more specifically, heroic images of men on horseback speaks to his belief in the primacy of imagination over realism, and it also reveals his commitment to form, which is understandably overshadowed in art-historical accounts of his work by discussions of his interest in color. For Delacroix in his later years, unity between an animal’s appearance and its character was an important aspect of pictorial convenance (suitability).⁶⁸ In an 1847 discussion of Pieter Claesz. Soutman’s engravings of hunt scenes by Rubens, for example, he praises the latter’s brilliant compositional skills in Hippopotamus Hunt (ca. 1615–16; Munich, Alte Pinakothek), but he complains that “the hippopotamus, who is the hero of the action, is a shapeless beast that no execution could render tolerable.”⁶⁹ For Delacroix, the hippo’s formlessness clashes with its role as the picture’s protagonist. Because of its ugliness, this creature was inappropriate subject matter, regardless of the artist’s representational talents or the heroic courage exhibited by the animal in its struggle against its attackers. Horses, by contrast, were beautiful creatures whose pleasing forms ennobled their strong emotions, and Delacroix privileged them in his later Moroccan pictures.

While the terms of Delacroix’s paintings of Moroccan men had shifted after 1845, his representation of Moroccan horses became more expressive and his memories more embellished by imagination. In his 1853 biography of the artist, Silvestre quotes Delacroix as saying that during his trip to Morocco, his delight in studying the horses was second only to his pleasure in sketching the inhabitants.⁷⁰ In Silvestre’s account, Delacroix waxes poetic on the theme of barb horses: “They have under the native sky a particular character of pride, of energy, that they lose in changing climate. Fairly often, they violently rid themselves of their riders in order to give themselves up to bloody battles that last for hours at a time: they attack each other with relish, like tigers, and nothing can separate them. The hoarse, fiery breaths that come out of their scarlet nostrils like the puffing of locomotives, their manes scattered or crusted with blood, their ferocious jealousies, their deadly resentments: everything in them, attitudes and character, rises to the level of poetry.”⁷¹ Here, Delacroix extolls the extravagant feelings and theatrical, ungovernable behavior of Moroccan horses. Comparing them to both tigers and locomotives, he argues that they are more than mere animals but instead represent the highest form of art. While Delacroix’s admiration for barbs was long-standing, his account to Silvestre makes strong public claims for their relevance to art, and it reveals that the free and energetic expression of equine passion was a central component of his later pictorial enterprise.

The dramatization of Moroccan horses in Silvestre’s biography had its roots in Delacroix’s 1832 experience of a horse fight outside Tangier and thus provides another opportunity to evaluate his ideas about the role of memory in painting. As we saw in chapter 3, Delacroix was entranced by this incident, which he recorded in his sketchbook and in a letter to friends back in Paris. In the letter, he reported, “Two of these horses tangled, and I saw the fiercest battle you can imagine,” exclaiming further, “Everything that Gros and Rubens invented of furies is but little next to it.”⁷² When Delacroix later wrote about the fight in his 1843 memoir, he embellished his account considerably from its original schematic outlines in the Meknes sketchbook. After identifying the gray horse as the aggressor in the exchange, Delacroix characterized the animal in tones both admiring and condemning: “It was, in the form of a horse, a beast as ferocious as a tiger: he was supposed to have killed a soldier once, and another time, to have seized with gusto a man who was passing in the market; the unfortunate [fellow] owed his health only to the promptness with which he separated himself from his djellaba, from which he exited [like a sword] from a sheath, leaving it prey to the animal who, biting and stamping with fury, reduced it to a thousand shreds.”⁷³ Here, more than a decade after the event, Delacroix amplified his story, stressing the ferocity of the gray horse so strongly that the creature takes on mythic proportions. More tiger than horse, it threatens the lives of the men around it.⁷⁴ This particular barb horse is represented as a force that cannot be tamed, beautiful but dangerous. In some ways, this account echoes Delacroix’s note in the same memoir about Abd el-Malek tearing up his damaged haik rather than allowing anyone else to use it, as discussed in chapter 3. Whereas the commander of the Royal Cavalry used anger to set a moral example of discipline for his soldiers, however, Delacroix’s Moroccan horses lacked both reason and self-control once their emotions were aroused. By the 1850s, the artist had begun to give this absence of restraint a thematic importance all its own.

Among his later paintings, Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable (1860) best exemplifies Delacroix’s interest in the Moroccan horse as an avatar of freedom and epitome of poetry, and the picture bears witness to his efforts to put his theories about memory and realism into practice (fig. 76). While his equine musings between 1848 and 1855 may have inspired him to finally take up the 1832 horse fight, Delacroix made changes to the subject that confirm his new commitments.⁷⁵ Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable features two steeds battling in a narrow, darkened room. Harnesses and saddle blankets hang from pegs on the walls, and bits of straw lie scattered in the foreground of the high-ceilinged space. Continuing the compositional experimentation seen in Moroccan Troops Fording a River, Delacroix created an asymmetrical picture by placing the main action at the left of the composition, where both horses rear into the air, twisting their bodies to bite each other’s necks (see fig. 66). A man clad in nothing but a haik rushes toward them from the right foreground, raising a whip in his hand. Two other men rise from piles of bedding on the floor, shaking off the weight of sleep. A green horse blanket, used in periods of rest, trails from the haunches of the sorrel horse, further heightening the early morning atmosphere created by the darkened room and half-risen men.

fig. 76 | Eugène Delacroix, Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable, 1860. Oil on canvas, 65.5 × 81 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

Aside from the stirring energy provided by the beasts, the scene bears little resemblance to the event that inspired it, and in its departure from Delacroix’s written recollections, Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable attests to his effort to give imagination a significant role. First, the battle takes place within the confines of a narrow interior space rather than out in the countryside, where he saw the fight in Morocco.⁷⁶ The three Europeans who witnessed the event in 1832 (Delacroix, Mornay, and English consul Edward Drummond Hay) are absent from the 1860 picture. Other than the haik worn by the main male figure, furthermore, there is little to identify the setting as specifically Moroccan. Perhaps most striking, the position of the two horses corresponds only roughly to Delacroix’s 1832 descriptions, in which the gray horse initiated the fight by biting the other animal’s neck.⁷⁷ Far from being the aggressor here, the gray horse appears to be the victim of an attack by the other horse, which is not black (as in the original account) but sorrel.⁷⁸ Aesthetic concerns may have motivated the color change: the rich chestnut tones of the sorrel’s coat complement the overall golden hue of the painting and are easier to see than black would have been. There is also some evidence that Delacroix looked to his own earlier paintings for inspiration.⁷⁹ In his notes about Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable, Delacroix cites his 1833 Collision of Arab Horsemen (see fig. 37), but an earlier painting is even closer. Two Horses Fighting in a Stormy Landscape, a lively oil sketch dated to around 1828, depicts a bay attacking a champagne horse in a gloomy gully (fig. 77). Although the positions and coats of the horses are different in the 1860 picture, the prominence given to the act of neck biting is the same in both.

fig. 77 | Eugène Delacroix, Two Horses Fighting in a Stormy Landscape, ca. 1828. Oil on canvas, 36.8 × 45.9 cm. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. © 2007 The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Photo: Michael Agee.

In addition to the alterations made to the animals, the change of setting from the expansive Moroccan plains to a dark stable and the transformation of the spirited gray horse from an attacker into a defender are also noteworthy. Rather than representing the unfettered exercise of freedom, as emphasized in Delacroix’s original accounts of the conflict, Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable communicates a more complicated message. Enclosed within the four walls of the building, the proud gray horse has to contend not only with its sorrel attacker but also with the men who rise from their beds to stop the fight. While these obstacles convey a sense of oppression, the sheer physical power of the two animals and the intensity of their mutual hatred suggest that no space can contain them. In a sense, this painting serves as a foil to the domestication implied by The Riding Lesson and some of Delacroix’s other contemporary pictures of barb horses, most notably The Moroccan Blacksmith (1852; private collection) and Horses at a Trough in Morocco (1862; Philadelphia Museum of Art).⁸⁰ In fact, as Allard and Fabre point out, the same pair of horses coexists somewhat more peacefully, albeit with plenty of spirit, in the seaside setting of a smaller painting Delacroix finished the same year, Horses Coming Out of the Sea (1860; fig. 78).⁸¹ If the animals in those paintings exhibit docile behavior, the explosive fury of the beasts in Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable proposes that they only tolerate human intervention to a certain point. In this regard, the agency and self-determination of Delacroix’s horses could be interpreted as a critique of the increasing commodification of horses during the Second Empire and their subjugation to more industrialized forms of labor.⁸² Delacroix’s changes to the setting of Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable offered him an occasion to articulate a powerful paean to freedom and animal autonomy while putting his theories about memory and the recall of details into practice.

fig. 78 | Eugène Delacroix, Horses Coming out of the Sea, 1860. Oil on canvas, 51.4 × 61.6 cm. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Photo © Josse / Bridgeman Images.

Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable should be seen as a strong expression of Delacroix’s position on painting in the 1850s, not only for its fusing of memory and imagination in the setting and accessories but also because of the way it seeks to correct what Delacroix perceived as the excessive realism of the work of some of his artistic peers.⁸³ One of these, as Trapp notes, was the late Géricault, long dead but not forgotten by his younger colleagues. Delacroix mentions Géricault’s 1818 print Two Dapple Gray Horses Fighting in a Stable in his journal in 1852, roughly five years before he started work on Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable (fig. 79).⁸⁴ In the 1818 lithograph, Géricault juxtaposes a passive, sullen onlooker, who watches the fight with little interest, with an angry groom who beats the animals viciously with a broom. Delacroix’s Arab grooms, in contrast, demonstrate both a lively concern for the creatures and a desire to break up the fight, but they show no inclinations toward either apathy or abuse. The distinction in the treatment of horses between Delacroix’s Moroccans in 1860 and Géricault’s Frenchmen in 1818 evokes Eugène Sue’s characterization of the two groups in his 1838 novella The Godolphin Arabian, which contrasts Arab compassion with French cruelty toward horses.⁸⁵

fig. 79 | Théodore Géricault, Two Dapple Gray Horses Fighting in a Stable, 1818. Lithograph on cream paper, 26.9 × 34.8 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Géricault features heavily in Delacroix’s critiques of realism in the decade preceding Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable. In Delacroix’s view, the older artist devoted too much attention to anatomical correctness and not enough to temperament in his images of horses. When he commented on Géricault’s lithograph in 1852, Delacroix compared him to Michelangelo: “Same strength, same precision, and despite the impression of strength and action, a bit of immobility, probably as a result of the excessive study of details.”⁸⁶ A year and a half later, he wrote his now famous words about the improvement in his Moroccan paintings after he “forgot enough small details.”⁸⁷ Delacroix’s critique of Géricault’s realism intensified by 1857, when he expressed outright disaffection with Géricault’s equines as he was preparing notes for his projected dictionary of art. Under the subject of the representation of horses, he writes, “One must not bring to them the naturalist’s perfect drawing, above all in grand manner painting and sculpture. Géricault too scholarly. Gros and Rubens superior.”⁸⁸ Although many of Géricault’s equine images possess a certain psychological intensity, he was dedicated to the mastery of anatomy and paid a great deal of attention to distinctions among breeds.⁸⁹ For Delacroix in his later years, anatomy came in at a very distant second to expressivity, while beyond the basic difference between Moroccan and European horses, the question of breed interested him scarcely at all. As he put it in 1850, “Cold exactitude is not art.”⁹⁰

Delacroix’s decision to challenge Géricault’s realism and rework his theme of horses fighting in a stable might seem peculiar, given that the older artist had been dead many years and was no longer the powerful cultural touchstone he had been during the early decades of Delacroix’s career. Perhaps Géricault functioned as a screen behind which other forms of more contemporary equine realism lurked. I am thinking, here, of Rosa Bonheur’s magnificent Horse Fair (1853; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), which Delacroix saw when he served on the Salon jury and for which he felt Bonheur deserved more recognition than she received.⁹¹ Yet Bonheur’s evident commitment to anatomy and distinctions between breeds meant that these beasts must certainly have represented to Delacroix the same fussy “scholarly” realism he attributed to Géricault. Speculation aside, Delacroix’s revision of Géricault’s work attests to the importance that this artist continued to hold for him even in the last decade of his life.

Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable demonstrates that Delacroix used his Moroccan experience in the latter part of his career to investigate the tension between memory and invention and to continue to seek out heroic subjects for painting. In this case, in particular, the subject also enabled Delacroix to further an internal dialogue with both his own earlier work and that of other artists. Along with these developments, he pushed the question of equine heroism and agency to a new level, casting the two horses as the undaunted protagonists in this picture. In a certain sense, Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable is the logical conclusion of a career marked by the exploration of the narrative power and expressivity of horses (especially barb horses), extending at least as far back as the emotive steed in The Massacres of Chios (see fig. 4).

The paintings we have examined in this chapter, along with many of his other pictures from this period, reveal Delacroix’s predilection for Moroccan subject matter that includes horses, but there are a handful of images from his later oeuvre that do not feature the animals. Much like The Riding Lesson (fig. 75), these works emphasize the transmission or sharing of culture: Jewish Musicians from Mogador (1843–46; Paris, Musée du Louvre), Arab Players (1848; Tours, Musée des Beaux-Arts), and Arab Camp at Night (1863; Budapest, Szépmuvészeti Múzeum) showcase the performative (music, theater, storytelling), while Arabs Playing Chess (1847–48; Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland) depicts intellectual culture. In some ways, these paintings speak to Delacroix’s own well-documented passion for music and theater. Such imagery did not appear in his earlier Moroccan works, which tend to focus more narrowly on military scenes and ethnographic themes surrounding politics and religion. In many ways, Delacroix’s oeuvre after 1845 offers a more robust, multifaceted conception of masculinity than did his earlier paintings: along with their roles as soldiers, statesmen, and powerful leaders, Moroccan men in Delacroix’s later works are also fathers, performers, and tenders of the broad realm of cultural capital. This chapter has focused on the images of men and horses because, in addition to being the most numerous and varied, they both attest to Delacroix’s overarching fascination with Moroccan manliness and reveal the changes that emerged from his new aesthetic commitments in the 1850s.

My analysis of this group of Delacroix’s later Moroccan pictures shows that he continued to investigate the expressions of masculinity he had encountered during his 1832 trip and explored in his earliest paintings of the 1830s. At the same time, he turned to new questions that had begun to interest him, namely the role of imagination and its corollary, memory, in art, both for their own sake and as correctives to the discontinuities of realism. Instead of clinging closely to his own 1832 sketches and notes, Delacroix refined his paintings with conceptual tools like imprecise recollection and the fusion or layering of several pictorial sources within one work, including images by other artists. While he moved away from his earlier privileging of history painting, he never abandoned his devotion to the pictorial experimentation and exploration of heroic manliness first seen in these pictures. At the same time that they pursued these commitments, Delacroix’s later Moroccan paintings constituted an important, complex testing ground for his rejection of realism and for the visual elaboration of his theories about imitation, memory, and imagination.

Conclusion

This study began with Delacroix’s representations of Turks in the 1820s and his quest for new approaches to history painting, the most consequential art form of the period. As the belated heir of the Napoleonic era and the seismic shifts it imposed on history painting, Delacroix challenged the norms of the genre, twice using models of Turkish antiheroism to do so. Despite his often-stereotypical images of Ottoman culture, Delacroix’s interest was piqued by the skillful horsemanship, emotional coolness, and sartorial élan of Turkish men, three crucial arenas for the expression of French masculinity in the first half of the nineteenth century that were particularly useful for history painting. His fascination with these qualities complicated his otherwise unfavorable views of Turks and may have been instrumental in leading him to seize the opportunity to travel to another part of the Muslim world in 1832. When he arrived in Tangier in January of that year, Delacroix realized immediately that Moroccan culture was distinct, markedly different from what he knew of the Ottoman Empire. Conscious of the uniqueness of his position as the first French artist to visit the kingdom, he hungrily recorded what he saw, filling notebooks, letters, and folios with drawings and notes. Abandoning the biased preconceptions he had absorbed about Ottoman culture, Delacroix ascribed to Moroccan men attributes of masculinity that he prized highly and that he described as classical. These included healthy emotional self-possession—as opposed to the callous lack of empathy imputed to Turkish men—as well as dignity, sartorial elegance and simplicity, and physical and political autonomy.

Delacroix’s generally positive construction of Moroccan men during his trip and in the paintings he made upon his return diverged sharply from the harsh rhetoric that would soon be put forth by the French military and the French state’s artistic mouthpieces, who cast Algerian Arabs as barbarians and awarded the values of classical culture to the French alone. Pushing further his challenge to the official view and pursuing his own fascination with what he perceived as Moroccan heroism and classical manliness, Delacroix explored the valor, equestrian skill, and martial excellence of the Moroccan cavalry in a series of pictures he produced during the 1830s and early 1840s, paintings that offer a view of Arab humanity that contested the dominant narratives of the day. In several of these works, Delacroix represented one of the Moroccan men he most admired, cavalry commander Abd el-Malek, as a model of effective leadership and manly courage. Throughout these works, Delacroix paid special attention to the barb horses that so often accompanied the men he painted. In his hands, the beasts embody freedom and emotional integrity, and they attest to the wisdom and skill of their riders.

The subversive undercurrent in Delacroix’s images of Moroccan men assumed its greatest proportions in his epic The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, a painting that proclaims Sultan Abd er-Rahman’s sovereignty, autonomy, and dignified leadership. More than a simple royal portrait, Delacroix’s massive canvas placed the sultan firmly within the ranks of the eminent subjects of history painting. At the Salon of 1845, The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage stood in both literal and figurative opposition to a roomful of triumphalist, dehumanizing images that showed North African Arabs being conquered by the French. Delacroix’s painting launched a robust rebuttal to such pictorial propaganda and set him apart from artistic rivals like Horace Vernet. After 1845, his attention turned toward mural paintings and toward his writings. These commitments, in tandem with his increasingly frequent struggles with chronic illness, left little time for major history paintings on canvas. At the same time, cognizant of the decline of history painting and the growing importance of genre and landscape painting, Delacroix began to incorporate these types into his easel-painting practice, including his images of Moroccan men. The smaller but no less complex works he made during this period extended his earlier focus on Moroccan masculinity but opened the theme to allow for greater pictorial and theoretical experimentation, especially around issues of realism, imagination, and memory.

In the spring of 1859, Delacroix sent paintings to the Salon exhibition for the last time before his death in 1863. Not long afterward, in August 1859, Sultan Abd er-Rahman died and was succeeded by his son Sidi Mohammed (Mohammed IV), whose parasol had been captured at the battle of Isly.¹ In November 1859, Morocco was invaded by Spain, which had spent months warmongering in an effort to distract attention from its own internal strife. The year before, Spain had found itself in a state of near collapse, and war appealed to Spain’s military leadership as a profitable way to boost support for its new regime. Seeking to exploit domestic tensions within Morocco, the Spanish government manufactured an incident, inflamed anti-Muslim feeling, and, echoing the behavior of French King Charles X with respect to Algiers in 1830, created one pretext after another for demanding satisfaction for contrived slights. Once Abd er-Rahman died, the Spanish set their plans in motion. The outcome of the War of Tetuan, as it is now known, was disastrous for Morocco, because the treaty created crushing debts that made Morocco financially dependent on Europe, especially Britain. As Susan Gilson Miller describes it, “Morocco was transformed into another subaltern state feeding European expansion by offering raw materials, cheap labor, and unprotected markets,” a state of affairs she attributes to the machinations of the British.² Nevertheless, as Miller demonstrates, Morocco otherwise held its own against European imperialism for many decades longer. It was not until the first years of the twentieth century that the French and the Spanish were able to seize power, taking advantage of the internal chaos caused by the troubled reign of the feckless young Sultan Abd al-Aziz, who had ascended the throne in 1894 at age fourteen. Despite deposing Abd al-Aziz in 1908, Morocco was not able to regain its footing; in 1912, France and Spain made it a protectorate until the country won back its freedom in 1956.³

My study has attended closely to the historical particularities of Delacroix’s Moroccan oeuvre, including the expectations created by his flawed understanding of Ottoman cultures, the political circumstances of his 1832 trip, the leaders of Morocco and their policies, the worlds of art and fashion in which Delacroix worked, and the artist’s shifting ambitions for his paintings over time. It is my hope that this account has created a new, more comprehensive understanding of Delacroix’s North African oeuvre. By adopting a method that combines close looking with a multilayered examination of the specific historical, aesthetic, and personal circumstances in which works of art are made, I have tried not only to recontextualize Delacroix’s images but also to deepen our understanding of them and suggest new avenues for exploration.

One such line of inquiry might revisit French (and even European) Orientalism with the same attention to specific histories and personal concerns that I have given to Delacroix’s work. Some of this scholarship has already begun; Roger Benjamin’s important examination of French Orientalist aesthetics and North African “Orientalists” after 1880 is one example.⁴ But there are more artists whose work might be fruitfully investigated in this manner: the paintings and drawings of Eugène Fromentin, Alexandre Decamps, Prosper Marilhat (who visited Egypt in the 1830s), and other understudied artists would surely benefit from the approach I have used here. Such studies would shed greater light on our understanding of cross-cultural communication (or the lack thereof) during the early years of modern imperialism.

Another, more theoretically oriented avenue of exploration might investigate whether Delacroix’s sympathetic representations of Moroccan masculinity participate in another form of stereotyping—the verso of the Orientalist will to domination, in which idealization reflects the same refusal to acknowledge the real that prejudice does. Delacroix’s discomfort with the courses de poudre when he experienced them in 1832, for example, contrasts rather sharply with his heroic depictions of these events once he returned to France. Idealization, too, may make images susceptible to later political instrumentalization. In 1964, Delacroix’s The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage appeared on a stamp that commemorated Sultan Hassan II’s 1961 coronation, five years after Morocco had regained independence from the French and Spanish protectorates (fig. 80). Benedict Anderson notes the ways in which mass-produced imagery, like maps and stamps, function as symbols of anticolonial nationalism, and this stamp certainly confirms his observation.⁵ By evoking Delacroix’s representation of Sultan Abd er-Rahman as an autonomous leader, the 1964 stamp asserts Hassan II’s own Alawite lineage and right to rule, and it hearkens back to an epoch when Morocco held its own against European powers. The stamp is both an emblem and a manifestation of decolonization in its original sense. Yet by the time it was issued, Hassan II had already established himself as an autocrat and would soon create a substantial record of human rights abuses as he crushed the democratic opposition.⁶ As a result, the Moroccan reclamation of Delacroix’s pictorial celebration of Abd er-Rahman’s leadership and autonomy is bittersweet. Whatever the pitfalls of idealization, however, it can never be as pernicious and destructive as the toxic, frequently racist nature of prejudice, especially when we are speaking of nineteenth-century representations of North Africans. Delacroix’s efforts, most pronounced in the first fifteen years after his trip, to capture something of the reality of Moroccan culture and his awareness of his own unease with certain elements of Moroccan life endow his images with a greater richness and moral authenticity than anything mere idealization could offer.

fig. 80 | Morocco, postage stamp commemorating the third anniversary of King Hassan’s coronation, March 1964. Multicolored postage stamp, 5.3 × 4.1 cm. Private collection. Photo: author.

The case of Sultan Hassan II’s use of The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage raises questions for a third area of future inquiry, namely the afterlife of Delacroix’s Moroccan oeuvre. Much has been made of the influence on European modernism of Delacroix’s North African pictures, especially Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834; Paris, Musée du Louvre) and Jewish Wedding in Morocco (1840; Paris, Musée du Louvre).⁷ But what about the ways in which his work influenced North African visual culture or was claimed and reinvented by North African artists? As Porterfield points out, Houria Niati’s No to Torture (1982–83; private collection) is one example.⁸ Dakhlia argues persuasively that Delacroix’s representation of the imperial parasol in The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage is part of a tendency to overemphasize that object: French visitors misinterpreted Moroccan royal traditions and latched onto the parasol as a form of regalia that was more intelligible to them. As a result, Dakhlia proposes, nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century sultans gave greater weight to the parasol than they had done previously in order to more effectively communicate their power to European outsiders.⁹ Similarly, we might inquire whether Delacroix’s images of the courses had any impact on the way they were subsequently represented or performed in Morocco or in other parts of the world. The courses, known in Morocco today as the tbourida, are now purely ceremonial in nature, but they occupy an important position in Moroccan patrimony. Indeed, the tbourida were inscribed in 2021 on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Cultural Heritage of Humanity.¹⁰

As this study has demonstrated, Delacroix’s generally positive interpretation of Moroccan men was largely at odds with the prevailing views of his time. I have compared Delacroix’s work primarily to that of his peers Decamps, Vernet, and Chassériau, who were the most famous contemporary painters of North African and Eastern Mediterranean cultures. But if we were to add lesser-known artists, like Adrien Dauzats, or later painters, like Eugène Fromentin (who emulated Delacroix) and Jean-Léon Gérôme (who extended Vernet’s project), it would become clear that Delacroix’s vision was about as affirmative of Arab men as anything nineteenth-century France had to offer. From a twenty-first-century standpoint, Delacroix’s position may remain unsatisfactory. Yet the caesura between his epoch and our own should not blind us to the ways in which Delacroix quietly, sometimes imperfectly, offered a consistent counternarrative to racist colonialism, one that argued for the equestrian virtuosity, skillful leadership, dignity, autonomy, and humanity of Moroccan men.

Notes

All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

Introduction

1. See, for example, Blanc, Eugène Delacroix, 44–6; Lambert, Delacroix et les femmes; Dumur, Delacroix et le Maroc, 108-22 ; Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 133-42; Porterfield, Allure of Empire, 117-41; Yeazell, Harems of the Mind, 22-36; Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies”; and Vauday, La décolonisation du tableau, 19-53. Porterfield also discusses the cross-disciplinary appeal of the painting (Allure of Empire, 134, 143–52).

2. These figures have been compiled using Johnson, Paintings of Eugène Delacroix (hereafter known as Paintings), vols. 3 and 4. Including lost paintings, there are ninety-five paintings with themes inspired by Delacroix’s trip to North Africa. Sixty-five of these depict male figures exclusively, sixteen include both men and women, twelve depict women only, and two are landscapes with no figures. Five of the images of women are highly generic odalisque types.

3. Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies,” 78.

4. See, for example, Arab Players (1848; Tours, Musée des Beaux-Arts) and The Riding Lesson (1854; private collection; fig. 75). Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. nos. 380 and 395. See chapter 5.

5. The possibility that Delacroix may not have visited an Algerian harem at all was first raised by Lambert, Delacroix et les femmes, 7–10.

6. My account in the paragraph that follows is based on Bennison, Jihad and Its Interpretations, 45–74; Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 21–105; Lugan, Histoire du Maroc, 201–9; S. Miller, History of Modern Morocco, 7–14; Pennell, Morocco Since 1830, 41–43; Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 46–50; and Terrasse, Histoire du Maroc, 2:320–21. For two art-historical perspectives, see Hannoosh, “Voyage au Maghreb,” 189–91, and Lambert, Histoire d’un tableau, 9–11.

7. On the trip, see Arama, Maroc de Delacroix; Arama, Voyage au Maroc, vol. 5; Hannoosh, “Voyage au Maghreb,” 174–78; and Regard, “Eugène Delacroix et le Comte de Mornay,” 31–60.

8. See Arama, Maroc de Delacroix, 204–5; Arama, Voyage au Maroc, vol. 5; and Hannoosh, “Voyage au Maghreb,” 176. Hannoosh notes that the government did cover the passage from Toulon to Tangier.

9. On the government-sponsored artists’ mission in 1830, see Miquel, Eugène Isabey, 1:53–59. On Vernet, see Marrinan, “Schauer der Eroberung”; Lemeux-Fraitot, “1833, El Djeza’ir”; and Sessions, “Horace Vernet en Algérie.”

10. This number comes from the catalogue for Delacroix’s posthumous sale: lot 663, “Livres de croquis.—Voyage au Maroc et en Espagne.—7 albums.” See Petit, Tedesco, and Burty, Catalogue de la vente, 77. Facsimiles of four have been published in Arama, Voyage au Maroc, vols. 1–4. The other two were recently published in Hannoosh, “Delacroix in Morocco and Andalusia.”

11. The titles of the eighteen Mornay watercolors are known from the catalogue of his 1877 sale (Féral, Catalogue des tableaux). Johnson painstakingly reconstructed the contents of this collection and proposed that not all of the watercolors were executed during the quarantine at the end of the trip, as has traditionally been believed (“Towards a Reconstruction,” 92–95). Hannoosh cites a letter written by a woman who was shown the album when she hosted the group on their way to Paris from Toulon, so it was certainly completed by the time they left Toulon (Delacroix, Journal, 1:247n325).

12. See note 2 in this chapter.

13. Said, Orientalism, 3.

14. Among the many insightful critiques of Said’s work, four of the most influential include Bhabha, Location of Culture; Clifford, “On Orientalism”; MacKenzie, Orientalism; and Ahmad, In Theory.

15. The first to call attention to this issue was Porter, “Orientalism and Its Problems.”

16. Porterfield, Allure of Empire, 9.

17. Porterfield, Allure of Empire, 119. Like Nochlin and Porterfield, Grigsby suggests that Delacroix sought to preserve the colonialist fantasy of the harem in his Women of Algiers (“Orients and Colonies”).

18. Bohrer, “Inventing Assyria,” 340.

19. MacKenzie, Orientalism, 39.

20. This assessment is based on working titles used by Delacroix in his writings and on my understanding of distinctions in costume, rather than the titles of the paintings as they are listed in Johnson’s Paintings, where terminology is largely generic (e.g., “Arab Horseman” in lieu of “Moroccan Cavalryman”). Moroccan and Algerian clothing exhibited notable differences of which Delacroix was aware; see chapter 2.

21. See Terrasse, Histoire du Maroc; Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine; and Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples.

22. See Terrasse, Histoire du Maroc, 2:321–23; Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 192–200, 210–69; Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 58–64; Lugan, Histoire du Maroc, 201–9; Pennell, Morocco Since 1830, 46–50; Bennison, Jihad and Its Interpretations, 114–30; and S. Miller, History of Modern Morocco, 17–22.

23. The other incident, of a much smaller magnitude, took place in 1851 at Salé. After two of their commercial vessels were looted in the port of Salé, the French requested compensation from the sultan. Persuaded by the governor of Salé that the request was groundless, Abd er-Rahman refused. The French responded by bombarding Salé, and the sultan then offered compensation. See Terrasse, Histoire du Maroc, 2:323–24.

24. See Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 210–69.

25. Collingham, July Monarchy, 253.

26. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7. Key studies include Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans; the essays collected in Beaulieu and Roberts, Orientalism’s Interlocutors; Codell, Transculturation in British Art; Hackforth-Jones and Roberts, Edges of Empire; and Sheriff, Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art. Three particularly salient examples for my analysis include Fraser, Mediterranean Encounters; Coller, Arab France; and Roberts, Istanbul Exchanges; all three seek to move beyond an exclusive focus on French representations by including robust analyses of interactions between specific groups of French and Ottoman peoples and the imagery that emerged from these exchanges.

27. Fraser, Mediterranean Encounters.

28. Studies that provide an overview of this period as a whole include Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor; Mosse, Image of Man; Rauch, Premier sexe; the essays collected in Forth and Taithe, French Masculinities; and Corbin, Triomphe de la virilité.

29. See Bertaud, “Virilité militaire”; Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, 15–46; and Rauch, Premier sexe, 19–46.

30. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, and Reddy, Invisible Code.

31. See Bertaud, “Virilité militaire”; Hughes, “Making Frenchmen into Warriors,” 51–66; and Rauch, Premier sexe, 47–59.

32. On the dandy and his complex, even fraught, definition and history, see Amann, Dandyism in the Age of Revolution, 3–5, 199–215; Barbey d’Aurevilly, Du dandysme; Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 26–29; Becker, Dandysme littéraire en France; Harvey, Men in Black, 29–32; and Stanton, Aristocrat as Art, particularly 107–74.

33. The most important, groundbreaking postcolonial criticism on the subaltern remains Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?.”

34. Said, Orientalism, 206.

35. Said, Orientalism, 220.

36. See Thomson, Barbary and Enlightenment, for a still-trenchant examination (unfortunately overshadowed by Said’s contemporary opus) of the distinctions between stereotypes about the Maghreb versus eastern North Africa and the Ottoman Empire.

37. S. Miller, History of Modern Morocco, 27–29.

38. The following discussion, with a comparison with Delacroix’s contemporary, Horace Vernet, can be found in Olmsted, “Reinventing the Protagonist,” 132–33.

39. The document, conserved in the Archives Nationales, F/21/752, was published in M. Sérullaz, Peintures murales de Delacroix, 49–52. On the question of the civilizing mission, see Porterfield, Allure of Empire, 137; and O’Brien, Exiled in Modernity, 92.

40. Delacroix, AN, F/21/752, published in M. Sérullaz, Peintures murales de Delacroix, 50: “La conquête d’Alger. La vengeance d’un affront fait à notre député aura changé la face du nord de l’Afrique et établi l’empire de nos lois à la place d’un despotisme brutal.”

41. For a detailed analysis of French characterizations of the conquest and colonization as liberation from Turkish despotism, see Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 29–66.

42. “La sape et la mine, ces instruments de progrès, ont fait justice des mosquées qui n’étaient bonnes qu’à encombrer la voie publique; et on a eu le barbare courage, et sous le même prétexte, de bouleverser dans les environs des villes les cimitières maures, dont j’ai vu les tombes, encores récentes, arrachées et entassées avec les décombres, au grand et légitime scandale des fils, des pères, des maris, réduits à suivre de l’œil les ossements troublés, et exposés au jour, des objets de leur tendresse.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 284.

43. On French urbanization projects and the destruction of mosques in Algiers, see Çelik, Empire, Architecture, and the City, 116–19, and Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations, 26–28.

44. “On connaît le respect et la dévotion superstitieuse des orientaux pour les morts; on comprendra donc sans peine quels sentiments amers, quelle rancune redoutable de pareilles mesures ont dû réveiller dans des cœurs déjà peu prévenus de tendresse pour les bienfaits de notre domination.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 284–85.

45. Hannoosh, “Voyage au Maghreb,” 184.

46. This manuscript was first published in 1998 (Delacroix, Souvenirs d’un voyage). A corrected version appears in Hannoosh’s edition of Delacroix’s Journal, 1:264–321. Hannoosh has recently published an English translation in Delacroix, Journey to the Maghreb, 24–55.

47. Jobert proposes that the manuscript was written in either 1842 or 1844 (introduction to Souvenirs d’un voyage, 44–45), but Hannoosh shows that 1843 is more likely (Delacroix, Journal, 1:185–88).

48. I discuss the view of Delacroix’s paintings of Moroccan horsemen as dramatized genre paintings in depth in chapter 3, but two examples include Théophile Silvestre’s 1876 characterization of Moroccan Military Exercises (see fig. 1) as an image of “fantastical visions” (visions fantastiques) (in Bruyas, Galerie Bruyas par Alfred Bruyas, 273) and Lee Johnson’s 1994 description of a watercolor that inspired the same picture as “a sort of Arab Derby” (“Influence of the Journey,” 119).

Chapter 1

1. “Nous nous figurions en gros que nous allions voir quelque chose de semblable à des Turcs. Pour un habitant de Paris, tout sectateur de Mahomet est réputé Turc.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 275.

2. “La vue de la première rue de Tanger devait faire évanouir complètement.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 275.

3. See, for example, the accounts of Ali Bey’s 1814 trip (Voyages d’Ali Bey el Abbassi); Auguste de Forbin’s 1819 journey (Voyage dans le Levant); and Louis Dupré’s 1825 visit to Greece (Voyage à Athènes). For an incisive analysis of Dupré, see Fraser, Mediterranean Encounters, 165–206.

4. My account in this paragraph of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century is based on Raymond, “Provinces arabes”; Mantran, “Débuts de la question d’Orient”; and Fahmy, “Era of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha,” 139–79.

5. On both paintings, see Johnson, Paintings, vol. 1, cat. nos. 105 and 125; R. Brown, “Formation of Delacroix’s Hero”; Jobert, Delacroix, 70–83; Fraser, Delacroix, Art and Patrimony, 39–77, 115–58; and Allard and Fabre, Delacroix, 15–32, 48–57. For The Massacres of Chios, see Busch, “Ikonographische Ambivalenz bei Delacroix”; Haskell, “Chios, the Massacres, and Delacroix”; Kallmyer, French Images from the Greek War, 29–37; Grigsby, Extremities, 237–79; MacNamidhe, “Delécluze’s Response to Delacroix’s Scenes from the Massacres at Chios”; and MacNamidhe, Delacroix and His Forgotten World, 67–89. For The Death of Sardanapalus, see Farwell, “Sources for Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus”; Johnson, “Etruscan Sources of Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus”; Spector, Delacroix; Steinke, “Archaeological Source for Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus”; and Bohrer, “Inventing Assyria.”

6. For the former, see Kallmyer, Images from the Greek War, 29–37. For the latter, see Fraser, Delacroix, Art and Patrimony, 39–77.

7. Lambertson, “Delacroix’s Sardanapalus.”

8. Delacroix read Amédée Pichot’s 1819–22 translation of Byron’s Greek-themed poetry of 1812–14 (Hamilton, “Eugène Delacroix and Lord Byron,” 108–10).

9. Kallmyer, Images from the Greek War, 8–37. Grigsby points out that certain French factions believed that the modern Greeks were unrecognizable from their distinguished classical forebears (Extremities, 242–45).

10. On Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, see Johnson, Paintings, vol. 1, cat. no. 98, and Kallmyer, French Images from the Greek War, 87–102.

11. The painting is given the name Scènes des massacres de Scio; familles grecques attendant la mort ou l’esclavage, etc, in Explication des ouvrages, 90 (cat. no. 450).

12. Many who were not killed by Turkish forces succumbed to the plague that quickly followed the Turkish attack. See Johnson, Paintings, vol. 1, cat. no. 105, and Voutier, Mémoires, 250.

13. See Olmsted, “Reinventing the Protagonist,” 40–41.

14. One anonymous Salon critic complained about the weakness of the Greeks and their scattered, ragtag appearance. See “Exposition de 1824,” 345–46. Friedlaender also points out the disjointed, “anecdotal” effect of the groups of Greeks (David to Delacroix, 111–12).

15. R. Brown, “Formation of Delacroix’s Hero,” 243–44.

16. Grigsby, Extremities, 257.

17. As Haskell put it, “Only one figure has any vitality: the brutal Turk on his prancing horse” (“Chios, the Massacres, and Delacroix,” 353).

18. On the Napoleonic soldier as masculine ideal, see Mosse, Image of Man, 50–52; Rauch, Premier sexe, 47–59; Hughes, “Making Frenchmen into Warriors,” 51–66; and Bertaud, “Virilité militaire,” 170–80.

19. See, for example, Vernet’s 1820 Peace and War (Le soldat laboureur) and 1823 The Veteran at Home, both in the Wallace Collection, London. Other artists who took up this theme include Hippolyte Bellangé and Nicolas Toussaint Charlet. On Vernet, see Kallmyer, “Imago Belli”; Kallmyer, “Sad Cincinnatus”; and Pougetoux, “Vernet et Napoléon.” On Napoleonic battle imagery during the Restoration, see Hornstein, Picturing War in France, 51–85.

20. See Delacroix, Correspondance, 1:4n1, and Stéphant, “‘Chili,’ où le frère ‘oublié.’”

21. Stéphant, “‘Chili,’ où le frère ‘oublié,’” 178.

22. See O’Brien for the nineteenth-century location of the finished version (After the Revolution, 226).

23. “Ses fameux tableaux de l’empire qui, dans ce moment, étaient dans l’ombre de son atelier, ne pouvant pas être exposés au grand jour, à cause de l’époque et des sujets. Il m’y laissa quatre heures, seul ou avec lui, au milieu de ses esquisses, de ses préparations.” Delacroix, first published in [Piron], Eugène Delacroix, 51. See also Delacroix’s “Cahier autobiographique” of circa 1853, in Delacroix, Journal, 2:1738.

24. Haskell, “Chios, the Massacres, and Delacroix,” 353.

25. See, in particular, Journal des Débats, June 9, 1822, 1.

26. Voutier, Mémoires, 251–56.

27. Fraser treats this issue, particularly Voutier’s account of it, in detail (Delacroix, Art and Patrimony, 70–74). See also Kallmyer, French Images from the Greek War, 25–29.

28. “Le torse de la jeune femme . . . n’en est pas moins remarquable par la délicatesse et l’énergie, et surtout par la touche chaude et hardie.” “Exposition de 1824,” 346.

29. “Elle est belle sans doute; mais plus je la trouve belle plus ses douleurs me déchirent.” A. V. A, “Observations sur quelques tableaux,” La Pandore, October 2, 1824, 3.

30. The harem, with its polygamy, eunuchs, and imagined lesbianism, was the best known of these constructs. The substantial literature on the harem is too long to cite here, but five key works include: Alloula, Harem colonial; M. Brown, “Harem Dehistoricized”; DelPlato, Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures; Peirce, Imperial Harem; and Yeazell, Harems of the Mind.

31. Thiers first pointed this out in his criticism of the painting in 1824 (“Salon de mil huit vingt-quatre,” 4).

32. Dupré mentions “seize têtes recemment coupés” (Voyage à Athènes, 3). Delacroix knew of this travel account, because he copied at least two of the plates from Dupré’s book (plates 7 and 26). Delacroix’s copies are both conserved at the Département des arts graphiqes, Musée du Louvre, Paris. His copy of plate 7 is found in a sketchbook (Louvre, RF 23355, fol. 32r), and his copy of plate 26 is an individual drawing (Louvre, RF 9269). The latter has been consistently misidentified as an 1832 drawing from North Africa. See M. Sérullaz, Inventaire général des dessins, vol. 2, cat. nos. 1610 and 1749.

33. Hugo, “Têtes du Serail.”

34. “Quand les Turcs trouvent les blessés sur le champ de bataille ou même les prisonniers, ils leur disent: ‘Nay bos’ (N’ayez pas peur), et leur donnant par le visage un coup de la poignée de leur sabre qui leur fait baisser la tête, ils la leur font voler.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:79–80 (entry for September 5, 1822).

35. Delacroix, Journal, 1:112 (entry for January 12, 1824).

36. “À droite un Musulman, la main sur son cimeterre, monte un coursier dont le frémissement et l’ardeur contrastent avec l’impassible férocité de son maître.” “Salon de 1824,” Journal du commerce, September 4, 1824, 2.

37. “Un autre Musulman, rempli d’un sang-froid féroce et mêlé de mépris, et tuant des chrétiens comme de vils animaux qu’on immole sans pitié.” L’Amateur sans prétensions [sic], “Salon de 1824,” 202.

38. “Le fier musulman, méprisant cette faible résistance, tire son sabre sans colère, et s’apprête à frapper le jeune homme avec un sang-froid et une habitude de meurtre effrayante.” [Thiers,] “Salon de mil huit cent quatre,” 4.

39. “Le guerrier tire son sabre avec un horrible sang-froid. On voit qu’il est rassasié de meurtres, et qu’il va immoler encore de nouvelles victimes sans plaisir comme sans regrets.” D., “Salon de 1824: Deuxième article,” Le Moniteur universel, September 8, 1824, 1226.

40. “Chacun semble se tenir en garde contre des émotions violentes; quand on les éprouve, on craint de les laisser paraître; sous le masque d’une gravité imperturbable, on dissimule les plaisirs qu’on reçoit.” Lacretelle, text for an unnumbered plate titled “Intérieur d’un café public, sur la place de Top-Hané,” in Melling, Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople, vol. 1. Delacroix knew of this collection and had seen at least one plate, which he mentioned in his journal and in one of his sketchbooks (Journal, 1:153 [entry for May 4, 1824], and Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 9152, endplate). On Delacroix’s use of Melling, see Johnson, “Towards Delacroix’s Oriental Sources.” On Melling, see Fraser, Mediterranean Encounters, 129–60.

41. On the French classical era, see Stanton, Aristocrat as Art, 192. On French military models, see Mosse, Image of Man, 17–19.

42. Outram, The Body and the French Revolution, 68–72.

43. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 9, 29, respectively.

44. “le sang-froid que donne la vie réglée.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:133 (entry for April 4, 1824). See also Delacroix, Journal, 1:98 (entry for May 16, 1824).

45. See Thomson, Barbary and Enlightenment, 17–18, and Kallmyer, French Images from the Greek War, 15–25.

46. “Les Omar musulmans et autres jettent livres, images vénérables et homme lui-même. Un œil louche l’escorte à son dernier soupir, et la harpie le retient encore par son manteau ou linceul. Pour lui, il se jette dans les bras de la Vérité, déité suprême. Son regret est extrême, car il laisse l’erreur et la stupidité après lui: mais il va trouver le repos.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:100 (entry for May 16, 1823). The painting titles are l’Homme de génie aux portes du tombeau and La Barbarie qui danse autour des fagots.

47. Thomson notes that eighteenth-century French writers charged Islam with endorsing the “deliberate destruction of learning and civilization” (Barbary and Enlightenment, 21).

48. Byron published his play Sardanapalus in 1821. For more information on Delacroix’s narrative sources, see Johnson, Paintings, vol. 1, cat. no. 125.

49. In a letter, Delacroix recounts the reprimand he received from Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld, Superintendent of Fine Arts (Surintendant des Beaux-Arts). Delacroix to Charles-Louis-Raymond Soulier, April 26, 1828, Correspondance, 1:217. Delacroix discusses this incident at greater length in his autobiography (see “Cahier autobiographique,” in Journal, 2:1743; and [Piron], Eugène Delacroix, 69–73).

50. On these sources, see Farwell, “Sources for Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus”; Johnson, “Etruscan Sources of Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus”; Spector, Delacroix; Steinke, “Archaeological Source for Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus”; and Bohrer, “Inventing Assyria.” Note that Assyrian art and architecture did not feature among Delacroix’s sources because little was known of them until archaeological excavations began in 1843.

51. See Lambertson, “Delacroix’s Sardanapalus.” Champmartin’s painting Massacre of the Janissaries (1828) is held at the Musée d’art et d’histoire, Rochefort. The tremendous diversity within the Ottoman Empire dated back to its earliest years. See Beldiceanu, “L’organisation de l’Empire ottoman,” 132–37, and Baer, Ottomans, 8–13.

52. On Girodet’s painting, see Delacroix, Journal, 1:137 (entry for April 9 [actually April 11], 1824). Without referring to specific pictures, Johnson suggests that Gros was an influence here (Paintings, vol. 1, cat. no. 125).

53. The link was briefly noted in Lacambre and Lacambre, “Politique d’acquisition,” 343, and Allard and Fabre, Delacroix, 29–30 (who posit that this image and several other massacre scenes reflect a collective sublimation of the violence of the French Revolution).

54. Delacroix mentions visits to the Luxembourg on January 12, March 3, and April 11, 1824 (Journal, 1:112, 123, and 137).

55. See Fahmy, “Era of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha,” 146, and Al-Sayyid Marsot, “Muhammad ‘Ali’s Internal Policies,” 156.

56. On the characterization of Sardanapalus as a deviant harem scene, see Yeazell, Harems of the Mind, 112–13, and Grigsby, Extremities, 316.

57. Lambertson, “Delacroix’s Sardanapalus,” 77. On ethnic and racial diversity in the Ottoman Empire, see Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, 4–28.

58. “Il invoque les bras de deux domestiques pour se soulever. Ses vêtements amples, le coussin sur lequel il existe, la volupté du harem, l’excès prématuré des plaisirs, l’ont énervé.” Pouqueville, Voyage en Morée, 115.

59. “De graves Musulmans, établis dans un kiosque avancé sur la mer, fument lentement une pipe chargée de parfums, et regrettent de payer le plaisir de prendre le café par la fatigue de le boire.” Forbin, Voyage dans le Levant, 41.

60. “Dans les moeurs orientales, tout se dirige vers le calme et l’indolence.” Lacretelle, text for an unnumbered plate titled “Intérieur d’un café public, sur la place de Top-Hané,” in Melling, Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople.

61. “Passé leurs jours à ravager le monde, ou à dormir sur un tapis, au milieu des femmes et des parfums.” Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, 221.

62. While working on Turk Seated on a Sofa Smoking, Delacroix made several watercolor studies of a similar subject. See Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 9268, RF 10346, RF 10345, and RF 9267 (M. Sérullaz, Inventaire général des dessins, vol. 1, cat nos. 96–8; vol. 2, cat. no. 1503).

63. “On croirait à le voir qu’il n’est que spectateur indifférent du sacrifice. Étendu mollement sur un lit de repos, Sardanaple goûte le dernier plaisir d’être obéi sans murmure et de tromper l’espoir de ses vainqueurs.” [Chauvin], “Beaux-Arts—Salon,” 244.

64. “On sent que le désespoir ne fait qu’effleurer pour ainsi dire cette âme affadie par les délices.” [Vitet], “Beaux-Arts,” 254.

65. Thomson, Barbary and Enlightenment, 52.

66. Gotlieb, Plight of Emulation, 157–59.

67. On horses as a symbol of nineteenth-century French masculinity, see Weil, Precarious Partners, 133–55. On breeding, see Blomac, La gloire et le jeu, 124–28.

68. On the horse as a symbol and expression of power and nobility from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, see Roche, Culture équestre de l’Occident, esp. 2:15–50, 247–88, and 122 (on the role of Anglomania specifically).

69. Bouchet, Cheval à Paris, 247–49, and Weil, Precarious Partners, 4–9.

70. On the impact of the Napoleonic wars on French horse breeding and veterinary science, see Blomac, La gloire et le jeu, 114–16, 124–29.

71. See Blomac, La gloire et le jeu, 148, and Blomac and Bogros, Arabe, premier cheval de sang, 128–32. Peltre points out that the Arab horse encompassed a range of breeds (“Cheval d’Orient,” 239). See also Roche, Culture équestre de l’Occident, 3:226.

72. “Dépend d’abord de la rapidité, de la maniabilité de la cavalerie, du ‘sang’ des chevaux.” Blomac, La gloire et le jeu, 124. On the dominance of Arab horses in cavalry confrontations, see also Roche, Culture équestre de l’Occident, 3:226–27.

73. On the enthusiasm of French veterinarians, see Blomac, La gloire et le jeu, 143–48, and Digard, “Rayonnement de la culture équestre orientale,” 253. On French attitudes toward Arab horse breeding, see Lamartine, Souvenirs, impressions, pensées et paysages, 7:15–17, and Daumas and Abd el-Kader, Chevaux du Sahara, 73–100, 173–85.

74. Millevoye, “L’Arabe au tombeau de son coursier,” in Oeuvres complètes de Millevoye, 1:89–90. My thanks to Amy Freund for drawing my attention to the painting by Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse that led me to this poem. See also Weil, Precarious Partners, 57.

75. “Je montais souvent une petite jument arabe de trois ans, véritable modèle de beauté, de vitesse et de douceur: elle était si caressante et si apprivoisée, qu’elle venait le soir appuyer ses beaux naseaux sur mon épaule et prendre sa part du souper.” [Forbin], Voyage dans le Levant, 157.

76. For a catalogue of Vernet’s prints, see Dayot, Carle Vernet, 122–26, 162–63.

77. See Delacroix, Journal, 1:158 (entry for May 10, 1824). Hannoosh (in Delacroix, Journal, 1:158n275) suggests that the print in question is Chef des mamelukes demandant secours, but item 831 of Delacroix’s posthumous sale includes both this print and Arabe du désert. See Petit, Tedesco, and Burty, Catalogue de la vente, 101.

78. See Delacroix, Journal, 1:172 (entry for June 30, 1824). On Auguste’s lost paintings, see Saunier, “Monsieur Auguste,” 239.

79. For further elaboration, see chap. 5. For some of his 1850s comments, see Delacroix, Journal, 1:836, 1073. See also Hannoosh, in Delacroix, Journal, 1:155n257, and Johnson, “Delacroix et Géricault,” 25.

80. The analysis that follows is informed by the following sources. On the changes in history painting, see Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe, 19–25, 161–70; Marrinan, Romantic Paris, 133–61; Chaudonneret, “Historicism and ‘Heritage’ in the Louvre”; Wright, Painting and History, esp. 1–14; Duro, “Giving Up on History?”; and Siegfried, “Alternative Narratives.” On the male figure, see Michel, Beau idéal; Potts, Flesh and the Ideal; Crow, Emulation; and Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble. For a longer summary of this development, see Olmsted, “Reinventing the Protagonist,” 27–29.

81. On the increasing importance of the equine body for nineteenth-century artists, see Gotlieb, Plight of Emulation, 155–59.

82. See, for example, Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 9153, RF 9142, RF 9152, and RF 23355. All four albums date to the 1820s and are published in M. Sérullaz, Inventaire général des dessins, vol. 2, cat. nos. 1745, 1747–49.

83. “Il faut absolument se mettre à faire des chevaux. Aller dans une écurie tous les matins.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:98 (entry for May 15, 1823).

84. For references to visiting stables, see the entries for October 5 and 12, 1822; May 16, 1823; March 17 and 21, 1824, in Delacroix, Journal, 1:87, 91, 99, 127, 129, respectively. For references to drawing horses while painting The Massacres of Chios, see entries for March 17, 21, and 22, 1824, in Delacroix, Journal, 1:127, 129. The visit to Elmore is mentioned in Delacroix to Jean-Baptiste Pierret, London, June 27, 1825, Correspondance, 1:161–63. On Elmore, see Delacroix, Journal, 2:2179–80; and Sotheby’s, Géricault: La collection Elmore. Delacroix’s drawings of Elmore’s horses can be found in his English sketchbooks at the Musée National Eugène Delacroix, Paris.

85. Petit, Tedesco, and Burty, Catalogue de la vente, 14, 27–28 (cat. nos. 81–84 and 202–11); and see Johnson, Paintings, vol. 1, cat. nos. 29–30.

86. See Johnson, Paintings, vol. 1, cat. nos. 33 and 35.

87. Per Johnson, “Delacroix’s Oriental Sources,” Delacroix studied Melling, Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople; Vanmour, Recueil de cent estampes; and a luxury album of illuminations entitled Costumes turcs de la cour et de la ville de Constantinople (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, côte Od-6). Delacroix also referred to Mœurs et coutumes turques et orientales, an album of watercolors by artist François Rosset (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, côte Od-19-Fol), as well as a text he called Costumes turcs by “Scheick”; per Hannoosh, this is probably Melchior Lorichs’s Costumes of the Turks (Delacroix, Journal, 1:153n248). In letters written from England in 1825, Delacroix asked his friend Pierret to make sure that the Turkish clothing and saddles were properly stored during his absence. See Delacroix to Pierret, London, June 18 and 27, 1825, Correspondance, 1:160, 163.

88. While he was working on Massacres of Chios, Delacroix referred to borrowing Turkish clothing from Auguste (entries of June 30, July 8, 1824, in Journal, 1:172–73). Though he maintains that Auguste might have visited the Ottoman Empire, as is popularly believed, Rosenthal acknowledges the absence of any documentation of such a trip and raises serious doubts that it indeed took place (“Jules-Robert Auguste and the Early Romantic Circle,” 45–52).

89. Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 9152, fols. 11v–14v and 18v–20r (in M. Sérullaz, Inventaire général des dessins, vol. 2, cat. no. 1748). Sérullaz provides references to the sources from the Cabinet des Estampes in what is now the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris.

90. Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 23355, fols. 20r, 21r–28r, 30r, 31r, 32r, and 33r (in M. Sérullaz, Inventaire général des dessins, vol. 2, cat. no. 1749).

91. See Tasso in the Hospital at St. Anna (1824), Charles VI and Odette de Champdivers (1825), The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero (1826), Cromwell at Windsor Castle (1828–30), and Cardinal Richelieu Saying Mass in the Chapel of the Palais-Royal (1828; destroyed 1848) in Johnson, Paintings, vol. 1, cat. nos. 106, 110, 112, 129, 131.

92. The following assessment is based on discussions of history painting in Bann, Paul Delaroche; Chaudonneret, “Historicism and ‘Heritage’ in the Louvre”; Gotlieb, Plight of Emulation; Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe; Marrinan, Romantic Paris; Wright; Painting and History; and Duro, “Giving Up on History?.” For a more detailed analysis of most of these sources, see Olmsted, “Reinventing the Protagonist,” 21–33.

93. See Bann, Paul Delaroche, and Wright, Painting and History, 30–120.

94. See Balzac, Traité de la vie élégante, 247–49; Moers, Dandy, 107–24; P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, 139–41; Harvey, Men in Black, 29–32; and Becker, Dandysme littéraire en France, 30–33.

95. Hope, Anastasius, 1:262. This text was first published in French as Anastasius ou les mémoires d’un Grec, trans. A. J. B. Defauconpret (Paris: Gide fils, 1820).

96. Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life,” 26. On Brummell, see Moers, Dandy, 17–38; and Becker, Dandysme littéraire en France, chap. 1.

97. On the elaborate, time-consuming arrangement of the cravat, for example, see P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, 117–18.

98. Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies,” 69–70.

99. See Delacroix, Journal, 1:144, 151 (entries for April 20, May 1, 1824).

100. “Ces êtres déclassés et frileux qu’il recontre sur les boulevards, portant barbe et turban avec une redingote et des bottes.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 275. On the presence of former inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire in France during the Napoleonic era and Restoration, see Coller, Arab France.

Chapter 2

1. “Je suis en train de courir pour un assez grand projet. Je serai probablement parti pour Maroc la semaine prochaine. Ne riez pas trop, c’est très vrai. Je suis donc très ahuri.” Delacroix to Frédéric Villot, December 8, 1831, Correspondance, 1:302.

2. “Nous nous figurions en gros que nous allions voir quelque chose de semblable à des Turcs. Pour un habitant de Paris tout sectateur de Mahomet est réputé Turc.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 275.

3. “Ce pays présente des différences sensibles avec les autres pays levantins.” Delacroix to Félix Feuillet, Tangier, January 25, 1832, Correspondance, 1:308.

4. “Au milieu d’un peuple très différent à beaucoup d’égards des autres peuples mahométans.” Delacroix to Théodore Gudin, Tangier, February 23, 1832, Correspondance, 1:313.

5. “Rome n’est plus dans Rome.” Delacroix to Auguste Jal, Tangier, June 4, 1832, Correspondance, 1:330.

6. “Le Maroc . . . était en train de révéler à Delacroix l’antiquité,” and “l’âme des héros d’Homère lui échappait jusqu’au contact avec ces frères cadets de Priam et d’Agamemnon conservés par le sol barbaresque.” Moreau-Nélaton, Delacroix raconté par lui-même, 1:131, 148.

7. See Arama, “Delacroix a-t-il compris le Maroc?,” 25–36; Huyghe, “Delacroix et le Maroc,” 17–24; Huyghe, Delacroix ou le combat solitaire, 123, 135–36; Jobert, Delacroix, 172-75; Johnson, “Influence of the Journey,” 114–25; and A. Sérullaz and Pomarède, “‘Rome n’est plus en Rome,”’ 62–81.

8. Porterfield, Allure of Empire, 136.

9. Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies,” 77–78.

10. O’Brien applies Delacroix’s claims from 1832 and 1843 to concerns he later expressed about certain aspects of modernization (Exiled in Modernity, 90).

11. Trapp notes Delacroix’s love of classical literature and philosophy as a high school student (Attainment of Delacroix, 12), while Jobert establishes Delacroix’s continued passion for the classics throughout his adult life (Delacroix, 35).

12. See Delacroix to Gudin, Tangier, February 23, 1832, and Delacroix to Edmond Duponchel, Tangier, February 23, 1832, Correspondance, 1:313, 314.

13. “Au lieu de l’oripeau et du luxe si l’on veut dont notre imagination parait à l’avance une cohue de pachas, de spahis, de bimbachis en costume de parade ou de théâtre, nous voyions devant nous trois ou quatre beaux vieillards, à barbe blanche, couverts de la toge comme des sénateurs de Rome, sans armes ni ornements quelconques.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 276. Hannoosh explains that a bimbachi is a superior officer in the Ottoman army, while a spahi is a cavalry soldier (in Delacroix, Journal, 1:276n445).

14. On the presence of Muslims from Ottoman-controlled territories in Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century, see Coller, Arab France, especially 140–66.

15. “Je me rappelle cette gélabia [djellaba] costume exactement antique dans une petite figure au Musée.” Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 39050, fol. 15v, and Journal, 1:205–6 (note dated February 4, 1832).

16. “Vous vous croyez à Rome ou à Athènes moins l’atticisme : mais les manteaux, les toges et mille accidents des plus antiques. Un gredin qui raccommode une empeigne pour quelques sous a l’habit et la tournure de Brutus ou de Caton d’Utique.” Delacroix to Armand Bertin, Meknes, April 2, 1832, Correspondance, 1:327.

17. “L’antique n’a rien de plus beau. Il passait hier un paysan qui était foutu comme tu vois ici. Plus loin, voici la tournure qu’avait avant-hier un vil Maure auquel on donne vingt sous. Tout cela en blanc comme les sénateurs de Rome et les Panathénées d’Athènes.” Delacroix to Jean-Baptiste Pierret, Tangier, February 29, 1832, Correspondance, 1:319.

18. See Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 282, where he described paying men to pose for him at the consulate.

19. Delacroix to Gudin, Tangier, Feburary 23, 1832, Correspondance, 1:313: “J’ai été par-dessus tout surpris de l’extrême simplicité de leurs costumes et en même temps de la variété qu’ils savent donner à l’arrangement des pièces qui le composent.”

20. P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, 128–29.

21. “Le costume est très-uniforme et très-simple, cependant par la manière diverse de l’ajuster, il prend un caractère de beauté et de noblesse qui confond.” Delacroix to Duponchel, Tangier, February 23, 1832, Correspondance, 1:314.

22. “La noblesse a un air aisé, simple, précis, naturel.” Marquis de Vauvenargues [Clapiers], Introduction à la connaissance, 29.

23. Moers, Dandy, 33–35, 121–24, and Becker, Dandysme littéraire en France, 30–37.

24. “Sujets modernes difficiles à traiter avec l’absence de nu et la pauvreté des costumes.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:1080 (entry for January 20, 1857).

25. “Ces messieurs étaient tous venus en grand uniforme nous recevoir poliment à notre débarquement et j’avoue que leurs tristes vêtements de couleurs sombres, et auprès desquels ceux de nos officiers ne faisaient pas meilleure figure, me parurent bien écourtés auprès de ceux des Africains; et certes un dieu descendu de l’Olympe pour passer quelque temps sur la terre, et mis en demeure de choisir l’une ou l’autre manière de se vêtir, n’eût pas hésité à préférer l’habit majestueux des Maures, qu’on pouvait, auprès de nous, prendre pour autant de rois.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 277.

26. The watercolor of Mornay probably dates to circa 1832–33, when Delacroix was first considering a painting based on the French audience with the sultan in 1832. See Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 369.

27. Delacroix to Armand Bertin, Meknes, April 2, 1832, Correspondance, 1:327.

28. This drawing’s generic resemblance to classical sculpture was noted (without specific comparisons) in Stuffman, Eugène Delacroix, cat. no. H18.

29. This sculpture was in the Louvre collections by 1804, when it was documented in Dubray, Notice des statues, cat. no. 93.

30. This man is identified as a soldier in Delacroix in Morocco, cat. no. 8.

31. “Imagine, mon ami, ce que c’est que de voir couchés au soleil, se promenant dans les rues, raccommodant des savates, des personnages consulaires, des Catons, des Brutus, auxquels il ne manque même pas l’air dédaigneux que devaient avoir les maîtres du monde.” Delacroix to Villot, Tangier, February 29, 1832, Correspondance, 1:319.

32. An excellent example of these distinctions can be found in the contemporary illustrations and indexes of Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, vols. 1–4.

33. Wein, “Delacroix’s Street in Meknes.”

34. “Dans une pose de sénateur romain, et drapé dans un burnous qui fait penser à une toge.” Moreau-Nélaton, Delacroix raconté par lui-même, 1:146. Note that Moreau-Nélaton uses the word “burnous,” but the man wears a haik.

35. “Ces gens-ci ne possèdent qu’une couverture dans laquelle ils marchent, dorment et sont enterrés, et ils ont l’air aussi satisfaits que Cicéron le devait être de sa chaise curule. Je te le dis, vous ne pourrez jamais croire à ce que je rapporterai, parce que ce sera bien loin de la vérité et de la noblesse de ces natures.” Delacroix to Pierret, February 29, 1832, Correspondance, 1:319.

36. “Toutes ces figures sont calmes et nobles.” Thoré, “Salon de 1845,” 1. Speaking of the sultan, Eugène Pelletan writes that “sa marche est grave”; he also characterizes the sultan’s ministers as possessing “une calme et fière tournure” (Pelletan, “Salon de 1845,” 1).

37. “La simplicité, la gravité des Orientaux . . . tous ces personnages au repos ont de la dignité naturelle, et sont traités avec une ampleur remarquable.” “Salon de 1845 (Onzième article),” 199.

38. Vigarello, Corps redressé, 127–33.

39. P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, 136.

40. “Le movement lent est essentiellement majestueux.” Balzac, Théorie de la démarche, 283. See also pp. 283–85, 297–99.

41. Convulsionnaires de Tanger has traditionally been translated into English as “Fanatics of Tangier,” but this translation is inaccurate. “Sectarians” might be more factually accurate but can also have a negative valence. “Convulsionists” is a neologism.

42. On the Aïssaoua and the moussem, see Brunel, Essai sur la Confrérie Religieuse; Reysoo, Pèlerinages au Maroc, 25–39; and Nabti, Aïssawa, 75–112, 350–55.

43. Although it was written in French, the only contemporary account to mention the Aïssaoua was published exclusively in Poland in 1792. See Potocki, Voyage dans l’empire de Maroc, 38–39.

44. On the absence of Moroccan documentation, see Reysoo, Pèlerinages au Maroc, 27, 50–51.

45. On the traditional date for the Aïssaoua’s moussem, see Reysoo, Pèlerinages au Maroc, 194, and Nabti, Aïssawa, 350.

46. Hannoosh in Delacroix, Journal, 1:252n340.

47. Féral, Catalogue des tableaux, lot 11 (“Une scène de convulsionnaires à Tanger”). Per Johnson, the location of the watercolor is currently unknown (“Towards a Reconstruction,” 95).

48. Burty, “Collection du Lau,” 474–75.

49. O’Brien, Exiled in Modernity, 90–91.

50. “À de certaines époques, ils se réunissent hors des villes; et, s’animant par la prière et par des cris frénétiques, ils entrent dans une ivresse véritable, et, répandus ensuite dans les rues, ils se livrent à mille contorsions et souvent à des actes dangereux.” Delacroix, in Explication des ouvrages . . . 1838, 55–56 (entry 457).

51. Hannoosh suggests that this figure is a soldier based on Lagerheim’s testimony that soldiers “surrounded and contained / les entouraient et les contenaient” the Aïssaoua on their visits to Tangier (in Delacroix, Journal, 1:252n340).

52. Mercey, “Salon de 1838,” 385: “l’ivresse du fanatisme”; and Gautier, “Exposition au Louvre,” 2: “la folie et la rage poussées à leurs dernières limites.”

53. [Decamps], “Salon de 1838 (Deuxième article),” 2: “ce n’est pas la faute de M. Delacroix si l’histoire religieuse des peuples barbaresques offre des chapitres si étranges”; and the anonymous writer for L’Artiste of “Salon de 1838 (Deuxième article),” 71: “M. Eugène Delacroix nous a, par ce tableau, donné le plus saisissant commentaire des mœurs de ces peuples barbares de l’Afrique, contre lesquels la civilisation de la France soutient depuis huit ans une lutte opiniâtre et sanglante.”

54. On Courtyard in Morocco, see Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 354.

55. Johnson, Paintings, 3:xxii–xxiii.

56. See Michel, Beau idéal, 105–25; Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, 222–38; and Crow, Emulation; 49–61, 74–81, 128–44.

57. “Les héros de David et compagnie feraient une triste figure avec leurs membres couleur de rose auprès de ces fils du soleil.” Delacroix to Villot, Tangier, February 29, 1832, Correspondance, 1:317.

58. David’s painting was shown at the exhibition to benefit the July Revolution’s injured in 1830, as was Delacroix’s Young Tiger Playing with Its Mother. See Explication des ouvrages d’architecture, cat. nos. 55, 304. Gros exhibited a version of Bacchus and Ariadne almost identical to the painting in Phoenix at the Galerie Lebrun in 1826, where Delacroix would have seen it. See Noon, Crossing the Channel, cat. no. 67.

59. “Il lui faut l’air libre et pur des champs ou des déserts. Il se dénature et se dessèche emprisonné.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 320.

60. Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies,” 75.

61. “Drew the Moor of the Sardinian consul [Dessiné le Maure du consul sarde].” Delacrois, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 39050, fol. 13v, and Journal, 1:204 (note dated January 31, 1832).

62. Delacroix notes seeing sketches of the group while visiting Auguste at home (Journal, 1:172 [entry for June 30, 1824]). M. Sérullaz speculates that Delacroix saw the marbles and sketched them in 1825 in the album Louvre, RF 9145 (fols. 24r–26r), and he also suggests that a drawing in the album Louvre, RF 9144 (fol. 9r) was made after one of Auguste’s drawings (Inventaire général des dessins, vol. 2, cat. nos. 1750, 1752). In albums that can be firmly dated to his trip to England, Delacroix sketched several of the Elgin marbles but not the “Dionysos.” See Musée National Eugène Delacroix, album MD-2019–3, fols. 18v–19r, 20r, 20v–21r, 22r.

63. See Quatremère de Quincy, Lettres écrites de Londres à Rome, 106 (letter 4); and Visconti, Mémoire sur des ouvrages de sculpture, 26–27. On recent iconographical debates about this figure, see Palagia, Pediments of the Parthenon, 19–20.

64. On Winckelmann and the Laocoön, see Mosse, Image of Man, 29, and Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, 136–42.

65. See chapter 1.

66. See Lowe, Critical Terrains, 75–101; Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 65; Clayson, “Henri Regnault’s Wartime Orientalism,” 150–57; and Haddad, Orientalist Poetics, 79–100, 125–36.

67. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, 53–54.

68. On the Revolution, see Outram, The Body and the French Revolution, 68–88. On Delacroix’s murals for the Palais du Luxembourg (1841–45), see Johnson, Paintings, vol. 5; and M. Sérullaz, Peintures murales, 67–69.

69. Finlay, “Animal Themes in the Painting,” 197.

70. See Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 21–22, and Lorcin, “Rome and France in North Africa.”

71. Savary, Lettres sur la Grèce, 283–85 (letter 32). Although there is no evidence that he actually read Savary’s letters, Delacroix includes them on a list of books about Turkey and Greece that he compiled while he was working on The Massacres of Chios (Journal, 1:153 [entry for May 4, 1824]).

72. On the evolution of the beau idéal, see Michel, Beau idéal. On the use of classical sculpture as a model, see Potts, “Beautiful Bodies and Dying Heroes,” and Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, 222–38.

73. Lorcin, “Rome and France in North Africa,” 300–17.

74. Shaw’s Travels was published in 1738.

75. Shaw’s Voyage de Monsr. Shaw was published in 1743, and his Voyage dans la Régence d’Alger in 1830.

76. Lorcin notes that Shaw’s text was “among the notable references for officers about to embark for Algeria” (Imperial Identities, 107).

77. “Je n’ai pas encore vu ceux qui sont drapés à la Romaine.” Delacroix to Félix Guillemardet, outside of Tangier, January 24, 1832, Correspondance, 5:157.

78. Betzer, Animating the Antique, 12. See also her chapter on the mutability of artistic representations of classical sculpture and the racialized debates about polychromy in the ancient world (23–79).

79. On the influence of Shaw, see Cartoux, “Horace Vernet,” 51–53.

80. On Vernet’s first trip to Algeria, see Dayot, Vernet, 138; Renaudeau, “Horace Vernet,” cat. no. 378; Lemeux-Fraitot, “1833, El Djeza’ir”; and Sessions, “Horace Vernet en Algérie.” In a two-part article, Hannoosh proposes that this first journey inspired a later trip to the Eastern Mediterranean in which Vernet and collaborator Frédéric Goupil-Fouquet created daguerreotypes that moved beyond Orientalist stereotypes (“Horace Vernet’s ‘Orient’ . . . Part I” and “Horace Vernet’s ‘Orient’ . . . Part II”).

81. “Rien ne peut mieux donner une idée de nos pères dans les plaines de Chanaan. C’était Jacob et toute la Genèse. Si un peintre d’histoire, comme j’en connais, pouvait voir cela! Ou si j’avais le talent d’en tirer parti, quel beau tableau on pourrait faire!” Vernet to General Louis-Marie-Baptiste Atthalin, Rome, summer 1833, in Fossier et al., Correspondance des directeurs de l’Académie de France à Rome, 5:259 (letter 451).

82. Note that this is Eliezer, a servant of Abraham, not Eleazar, the nephew of Moses. On Vernet’s use of Arab models, see Cartoux, “Horace Vernet.” For his use of them within the context of French religious painting more broadly, see Foucart, Renouveau de la peinture religieuse, 328–29, and Driskel, Representing Belief, 193–96.

83. Explication des ouvrages . . . 1834, 175 (entry 1895). Vernet made a very close variant, now at the Musée Condé, Chantilly, that same year. See Renaudeau, “Horace Vernet,” cat. no. 367.

84. “Ce n’est assurément pas le beau sujet biblique de Rébecca et d’Éliézer . . . qu’il nous représente, mais une simple scène de la vie arabe.” Annales du Musée . . . 1835, 27.

85. “Horace Vernet avait à traduire une des scènes les plus patriarcales de la Bible, et ce sont des Bédouins coquets qu’il nous montre! . . . Des Bédouins d’Alger pour traduire la Bible! Est-il rien de plus irrespectueux pour l’art?” Schoelcher, “Salon de 1835,” 274.

86. “La première révélation m’en a été faite en Algérie, un jour qu’en expédition contre certaines tribus des environs de Bône je lisais dans le fond de ma tente le sujet de Rebecca à la fontaine, portant sa cruche sur son épaule gauche, et la laissant glisser sur son bras droit pour donner à boire à Éliézer. Ce mouvement me parut assez difficile à comprendre; je levais les yeux, et que vis-je? . . . une jeune femme donnant à boire à un soldat et reproduisant exactement l’acte dont je cherchais à me rendre compte.” Vernet, “Des rapports qui existent entre le costume,” 570. This is the text of a lecture Vernet gave at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1847. It was published in both L’Illustration and L’Artiste in 1848.

87. “Incinctus, gens qui ne sont pas guerriers. Cinctus ou accinctus, militaires. Cette distinction qui existait chez les anciens se trouve ici!” Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 39050, fol. 15v, and Journal, 1:205 (note dated February 4, 1832).

88. “Les soldats à cheval ressemblant aux soldats romains.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 306.

Chapter 3

1. “Au milieu de ces vastes plaines remplies de fleurs et d’herbes qui s’exhalaient sous les pieds de nos chevaux, on se sent un autre être, on est un homme.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 320. The argument and supporting evidence of this chapter reflect recent scholarship, including Hannoosh’s edition of the Journal, but all of the images and writings by Delacroix, with the exception of Mohammed ben Abou ben Abd el-Malek in His Tent; the quote from Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 295; and the quote from Delacroix in Explication des ouvrages . . . 1847 (cat. no. 460), were first analyzed in my 2005 dissertation (Olmsted, “Reinventing the Protagonist,” 139–201).

2. Moroccan Military Exercises was painted in 1832, shortly after Delacroix returned from North Africa (fig. 1). See Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 351.

3. Silvestre, Galerie Bruyas par Alfred Bruyas, 273: “visions fantastiques” and “merveilleuse outrance.”

4. Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies,” 76.

5. Peltre, “Cheval d’Orient,” 241: “Ces images d’une équitation sauvage renforcent celle, qui semble éternelle, de l’Orient cruel et passionné.”

6. O’Brien, Exiled in Modernity, 96–97.

7. Johnson, for example, refers to these letters in Paintings (vol. 3, cat. no. 355), but he uses the generic descriptor “Arab Cavalry” in the titles of the relevant paintings (cat. nos. 349, 351, and 353, 376). An exception to this tendency can be found in Delacroix in Morocco, cat. no. 58, which gives J351 its proper title: Moroccan Military Exercises.

8. Charles de Mornay to Horace Sébastiani, February 16 and March 23, 1832, in Arama, Voyage au Maroc, 6:205, 215.

9. Delacroix to Mr. X [Charles Leroux], May 26, 1839, in Correspondance, 2:37–38. Johnson identified the recipient as Leroux (Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 355).

10. “Des cavaliers, en nombre quelquefois très considérable, partent tous à la fois en poussant des cris et en agitant leurs armes. . . . Au bout de la carrière, chaque cavalier tire son coup de fusil en arrêtant tout court sa monture pour aller recharger. . . . Cela s’appelle courir la poudre.” Delacroix, in Explication des ouvrages . . . 1847, 53–54 (cat. no. 460).

11. The French translation of the Arabic phrase comes from Arama, Voyage au Maroc, 5:203n52. Today the courses are purely ceremonial and are known as the tbourida. See Pouillon, “Sur les ‘fantasias,’” and Talley, “Gunpowder Games.”

12. Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse, 2nd ed. (Paris: Librairie Classique et Boyer, 1872), s.v. “Fantasia,” 8:92–93. The first usage I have found comes from the 1845 Salon catalogue, where Alexandre Girardot used it in the title of a painting that depicted military exercises: Une fantasia en Afrique, cat. no. 719 (Explication des ouvrages . . . 1845, 88). The only usage I have found by Delacroix occurred in 1860, when he uses the term to describe one of his North African hunt pictures (Journal, 2:1347 [note dated April 15, 1860]). See also Pouillon, “Sur les ‘fantasias.’”

13. “Les exercices de la cavalerie consistent à parcourir au grand galop un espace de deux cents toises par troupes de huit à dix cavaliers qui poussent de grands cris. Dans ce trajet ils élèvent un moment leur fusil sur la tête, le tenant à bras tendu et par son centre de gravité, ils le mettent ensuite en joue toujours d’une seule main et dirigeant leur fusil sur leur adversaire ou la personne qu’ils veulent honorer, ils lui lâchent le coup à dix pas en abattant la gâchette de la main gauche, sans abandonner les rènes, le coup parti, ils arrêtent tout court et reviennent à deux cents toises en arrière recharger leur arme.” Burel, Mission du capitaine Burel au Maroc, 72.

14. Delacroix, it should be noted, painted his Moroccan soldiers firing with the right hand rather than the left, as Burel describes.

15. Rauch, Premier sexe, 50–51.

16. Bertaud, “Virilité militaire,” 181–85, 189–90.

17. On Vernet’s commitment to Bonapartist ideals, see Kallmyer, “Sad Cincinnatus”; Kallmyer, “Imago Belli”; Hornstein, Picturing War in France, 56–83; and Pougetoux, “Vernet et Napoléon.”

18. See Johnson, Paintings, vol. 1, cat. nos. 141, 143; Pétry, “Héros romantique,” 97–100; and Allard and Fabre, Delacroix, 57.

19. See chapter 1.

20. Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 275–77, and Bertaud, “Virilité militaire,” 185.

21. Haussard, “Salon de 1845,” 1. See also Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 96–122.

22. See the introduction for Delacroix’s position on Algeria.

23. See Olmsted, “Sultan’s Authority,” 91. See also Terrasse, Histoire du Maroc 2:320–21; Pennell, Morocco Since 1830, 42–43; Gershovich, French Military Rule in Morocco, 46; and Kenbib, “Impact of the French Conquest,” 34–38. Per S. Miller, this neutrality cost the sultan dearly in his popularity at home (History of Modern Morocco, 15–17).

24. “Je trouvais là des hommes plus hommes que nous.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 285. He goes on to describe what he perceives as their shortcomings as “le fruit de la corruption des sociétés.”

25. “L’homme n’est pas fait pour s’enfermer dans des habitations de pierre et de plâtre. Il lui faut l’air libre et pur des champs ou des déserts. Il se dénature et se dessèche emprisonné.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 320.

26. Later, in the 1850s, Delacroix would contrast the bustle and artifice of Paris unfavorably with the authenticity and tranquility of the countryside (Journal, 1:916–17, 1173 [entries for June 21, 1855, and September 3, 1857]).

27. “Relevé à moitié mort. Remonté à cheval un instant après.” Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fol. 11v, and Journal, 1:217 (note dated March 9, 1832).

28. My sources for the discussion of warfare styles that follows include Blomac, La gloire et le jeu, 116, 125; Bennison, Jihad and Its Interpretations, 121; S. Miller, History of Modern Morocco, 18; and Azan, Armée d’Afrique, 26.

29. On the shift to a ceremonial function for the courses, see Pouillon, “Sur les ‘fantasias.’”

30. In his notebook from the Meknes trip, Delacroix mentions seven performances of the courses. See Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, notes dated March 5 (fol. 5v), March 6 (fols. 7r, 7v), March 8 (fol. 9v), March 9 (fol. 11r), March 15 (fols. 16v, 17v), April 9 (fol. 29v), and April 11 (fol. 31v); and Delacroix, Journal, 1:214–17, 221–22, 232, 234.

31. On French colonial expansion in Algeria during the 1830s, see Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 46–63, and Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 64–163.

32. Quoted in Kenbib, “Impact of the French Conquest,” 35.

33. Bennison, Jihad and Its Interpretations, 70.

34. “Nous sommes ici depuis un mois environ et nous partons tous pour Méquinez où est l’empereur maintenant, et où il doit nous recevoir avec toutes sortes de politesses mauresques, coups de fusil, courses de chevaux, etc., etc.” Delacroix to Théodore Gudin, Tangier, February 23, 1832, Correspondance, 1:313.

35. “À chaque instant on rencontrait de nouvelles tribus armées qui faisaient une dépense de poudre effroyable pour fêter notre arrivée.” Delacroix to Pierret, Meknes, March 16, 1832, Correspondance, 1:320–21.

36. “Cela fait un vacarme extrêmement étourdissant qui se mêle aux décharges de la cavalerie et de l’infanterie et des plus enragés qui perçaient tout autour de nous pour nous tirer à la figure. Tout cela nous donnait une colère mêlée de comique que je me rappelle à présent avec moins d’humeur.” Delacroix to Pierret, Meknes, March 16, 1832, Correspondance, 1:321–22.

37. “Un homme perce la foule des soldats et vient tirer à notre nez. Il est saisi par Abou. Sa fureur. Par le turban défait on l’entraîne, on le couche plus loin. Mon effroi. Nous courons. Le sabre était déjà tiré, etc.” Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fol. 9v, and Journal, 1:216 (note dated March 8, 1832).

38. “En arrivant devant la ville de Kassar-el-Gibir, un des malheureux qui jouaient la poudre mit l’emprudence de se précipiter au milieu de chevaux de mon escorte pour avoir la triste satisfaction de me tirer un coup de fusil à bout pourtant. Le pacha le fit arrêter et ordonna qu’on lui coupe la tête à l’instant même. Je n’eus que le temps d’accourir pour demander sa grâce, qui me fut accordée, une minute plus tard la sentence était executée.” Mornay to Sébastiani, March 23, 1832, in Arama, Voyage au Maroc, 6:215. The pasha in question is probably the pasha of Larache.

39. There are conflicting accounts about the man’s ultimate fate. See Arama, Voyage au Maroc, 241n35; Brooks, Memoir of Sir John Drummond Hay, 196–97; and Delacroix, Journal, 1:216n161.

40. Indeed, as Hannoosh notes, Abd el-Malek reportedly meant to set an example by executing the offender (Delacroix, Journal, 1:216n161).

41. “Ces marques de considération ne sont pas sans danger pour les chrétiens qui les reçoivent car les Maures se plaisent à leur tirer au visage pour voir s’ils se laissent effrayer.” Mornay to Sébastiani, March 23, 1832, in Arama, Voyage au Maroc, 6:215.

42. “Les marques d’inimitié manifestées plusieurs fois à mon égard par la plupart des fanatiques de cette contrée m’ont mis à même de remarquer que cette escorte si nombreuse et qui me semblait superflue au moment du départ était à peine suffisante pour contenir cette multitude et que l’ordre donné par l’Empereur aux différents pachas dont j’ai traversé les provinces de me traiter honorablement et de me faire respecter avait été exécuté de point en point.” Mornay to Sébastiani, March 23, 1832, in Arama, Voyage au Maroc, 6:215.

43. Bennison, Jihad and Its Interpretations, 71.

44. Bennison, Jihad and Its Interpretations, 70.

45. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6–7.

46. Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 320.

47. See chapter 1.

48. Vergnaud, Manuel d’équitation. On the various methods of instruction available to nineteenth-century Frenchmen and women, see Roche, Culture équestre de l’Occident, 3:150–51.

49. Blomac, La gloire et le jeu, 116–19, and Blomac and Bogros, Arabe, premier cheval de sang, 145.

50. “Autre plaisir que j’avais encore: l’étude des chevaux arabes.” Delacroix, quoted in Silvestre, Histoire des artistes vivants, 66.

51. See Blomac, La gloire et le jeu, 144–47, and Digard, “Rayonnement de la culture équestre orientale,” 253.

52. See Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 349, and Delacroix, Journal, 1:499 (entry for April 10, 1850). The other was a portrait of Mme Delaporte, wife of the French consul at Tangier (Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 215).

53. A late nineteenth-century biographer of Delacroix gave this painting the subtitle “The Prayer.” See Moreau, E. Delacroix et son œuvre, 269.

54. Forbin, Voyage dans le Levant, 157.

55. Lamartine, Souvenirs, impressions, pensées et paysages, 7:72: “Chez les Arabes, le cheval du maître est toujours là aussi, couvert de son harnais magnifique, et prêt à être monté; il fait complètement partie de la famille, et semble prendre intérêt à tout ce qui se fait, à tout ce qui se dit autour de lui; sa physionomie s’anime comme celle d’un visage humain.”

56. See also Blomac and Bogros, Arabe, premier cheval de sang, 128–32; Daumas, Chevaux du Sahara, 37.

57. Weil, Precarious Partners, 44-62.

58. Roche, Culture équestre de l’Occident, 3:225.

59. “les plus doux sont tous des diables.” Delacroix to Pierret, Tangier, February 8, 1832, Correspondance, 1:311.

60. “Ils sont ordinairement servis à merveille par l’ardeur et l’émulation de leurs chevaux. Quelquefois le caprice de ces derniers donne lieu à des accidents. . . . Cette dernière manœuvre n’est pas non plus sans inconvénient, grâce aux accidents de terrain et à l’impétuosité des chevaux, très difficile à comprimer brusquement malgré la violence du mors.” Delacroix, in Explication des ouvrages . . . 1847, 53 (cat. no. 460).

61. Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 355. The first version of Collision of Arab Horsemen (cat. no. 355) was painted in 1833–34; the second version (cat. no. 367) was painted in 1843–44. On the differences between the two, see Johnson, “Delacroix’s Rencontre de Cavaliers Maures.”

62. “Courses de poudre dans la plaine avant la rivière. Les deux hommes qui se sont choqués. Celui dont le cheval a touché du cul par terre.” Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fol. 7r, and Journal, 1:214 (note dated March 6, 1832).

63. “Il arrive souvent que les chevaux emportent leurs cavaliers et se battent entre eux quand ils se rencontrent. C’est la situation des deux figures principales de ce tableau.” Delacroix to Monsieur X, May 26, 1839, Correspondance, 2:38.

64. “D’abord ils se sont dressés et battus avec un acharnement qui me faisait frémir pour ces messieurs, mais vraiment admirable pour la peinture. J’ai vu là, j’en suis certain, tout ce que Gros et Rubens ont pu imaginer de plus fantastique et de plus léger.” Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 39050, fol. 10v, and Journal, 1:203 (note dated January 29, 1832). For more on how Delacroix used his sketchbooks on the Meknes trip, see Hannoosh, “Delacroix in Morocco and Andalusia.”

65. See Caillé, Mission de Léon Roches, 60n116; Brooks, Memoir of John Drummond Hay, 78, 184–97; Pennell, Morocco Since 1930, 53–55; Godard, Maroc, 67–66; and “Correspondance particulière,” 3. Abd el-Malek’s precise rank in 1832 is somewhat murky. His friend Drummond Hay describes him as “Commander-in-Chief of the Sultan’s Cavalry” (Brooks, Memoir of John Drummond Hay, 184), but Godard says he was a general (Maroc, 68).

66. See Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fols. 9r, 11v–12r, 22v, and 29r (in M. Sérullaz, Inventaire général des dessins, vol. 2, cat. no. 1756; and Delacroix, Journal, 1:215, 218, 228, 232 [notes dated March 7, 10, 30, and April 8, 1832]). On the role of horses in North African culture, see Boutros-Ghali, Tradition chevaleresque des Arabes, 153–204; and Daumas and Abd el-Kader, Chevaux du Sahara.

67. This drawing is the only instance in 1832 in which Abd el-Malek’s name (as Ben Abou) appears alongside a legible sketch of a man’s face (there is an illegible dime-sized graphite and watercolor sketch of a man’s face, presumably Abd el-Malek, at the bottom of Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fol. 29r). Although Arama and others frequently describe certain 1832 sketches as portraits of Abd el-Malek, there is no documentary evidence to support these attributions and no strong physical resemblance. See Olmsted, “Reinventing the Protagonist,” 185n91.

68. For the drawing, see Johnson, “Towards a Reconstruction of Delacroix’s Mornay Album,” fig. 32. For the print, see Delacroix in Morocco, cat. no. 67.

69. Arlach, Maroc en 1856, 40.

70. This teapot is different from the one Delacroix sketched in his notebook on one of his visits to Abd el-Malek in his tent during the trip to Meknes. See Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fol. 12r (in M. Sérullaz, Inventaire général des dessins, vol. 2, cat. no. 1756).

71. Delacroix, Journal, 1:215 (notes dated March 6 and 7, 1832). On Sultan Abd er-Rahman’s efforts to reform the military, see S. Miller, History of Modern Morocco, 16–17.

72. “Arrivé au campement, Abou a déchiré en pièces son manteau, voulant plutôt le brûler que de permettre que qui que ce soit pût en profiter. On lui a aussi cassé sa pipe. Il était furieux et intraitable pour les soldats.” Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fol. 14v, and Journal, 1:220 (note dated March 12, 1832).

73. See Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fols. 30r, 32v, and Journal, 1:233–34 (notes dated April 10 and 12, 1832).

74. “Abou, le général qui nous a conduits, était l’autre jour assis sur le pas même de la porte. Il y avait sur le banc notre garçon de cuisine. Il n’a fait que s’incliner un peu de côté pour nous laisser passer. Il y a quelque chose de républicain dans ce sans-façon. Les grands de l’endroit vont se mettre dans un coin de la rue accroupis au soleil et causent ensemble, ou se jucher dans quelque boutique de marchand.” Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 39050, fols. 33r–33v, and Journal, 1:237 (notes dated April 27, 1832).

75. “La beauté de Ben Abou dans les courses. Les chevaux partant comme le tonnerre. Donne une idée de la chevalerie. Renverse toutes nos idées modernes d’un guérrier. Le général chez nous a une tenue du plus calme. Une petite épée qu’il ne tire jamais. Où est Tancrède, Renaud?” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 313.

76. Delacroix was a lifelong admirer of Rossini’s work, especially Tancredi, which he had already seen at least four times by 1824. See Delacroix, Journal, 1:89, 136 (entries for October 8, 1822 [where he says he just saw it for the third time], and April 8, 1824).

77. “À la vérité le kaïd Ben Abou . . . rappelait tout à fait à l’esprit par sa tournure et par ses habitudes ce qu’on se figure des anciens chevaliers maures conquérants de l’Espagne.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 316.

78. “Le brillant guerrier qu’on voyait toujours le plus ardent dans les courses et le plus infatigable.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 315–16.

79. “Son attitude languissante sur sa paisible mule ne rappelait pas le brillant guerrier.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 315.

80. “Quel est le général d’armée chez nous qui ne rougirait pas d’être vu sur une mule.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 312.

81. Explication des ouvrages . . . 1838, 56 (cat. no. 458). See also Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 359.

82. In addition to the passage cited below, Delacroix describes the scene briefly on April 11, 1832 (Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fol. 31v; and Journal, 1:234) and on a list of Moroccan subjects compiled after the trip, 1832–34 (Journal, 2:1516).

83. “Le lait offert par les femmes. Un bâton avec un mouchoir blanc. D’abord le lait aux porte-drapeaux qui ont trempé le bout du doigt. Ensuite au kaïd et aux soldats” (in Delacroix, Journal, 1:233 [note dated April 9, 1832]). When reminiscing about the same scene in the early 1840s, Delacroix identified the commander explicitly in his notation about “the peasants who bring Abou the milk in which he dips his finger, etc. / Les paysans qui apportent à Abou le lait dans lequel il trempe le doigt, etc.” Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fol. 30r, and “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 316.

84. O’Brien, Exiled in Modernity, 105.

85. See Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 10652r (in M. Sérullaz, Inventaire général des dessins, vol. 1, cat. no. 233). The drawings on the verso include a sketch of Saint Sebastian (exhibited at the Salon of 1836) and one of Medea (exhibited, like Moroccan Chieftain, at the Salon of 1838). Although Sérullaz suggests that the drawings of Arabs on the recto were executed during the trip to Morocco, this seems unlikely because Delacroix did not typically use his North African drawings in this manner. Given the proximity in date of the two sketches on the verso to Moroccan Chieftain, it is my opinion that the drawings on the recto are, in fact, preparatory sketches for Moroccan Chieftain made sometime between 1835 and 1837.

86. Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 359.

87. Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 274.

88. See Munholland, “Michaud’s History of the Crusades,” and Cardini, Europe et Islam, 283–84.

89. Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 274.

90. See introduction for my discussion of Delacroix’s critiques of the French destruction of mosques and desecration of cemeteries in Algiers.

91. Johnson gives it the title Arab Soldier by a Grave (Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 362).

92. In the jury record, the painting was listed as Guerrier près d’un tombeau (Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 362). In a note dating to between circa 1845 and 1847, Delacroix calls it Ben-Abou auprès d’un tombeau (Journal, 2:1540n18, 1541).

93. See Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 39050, fol. 18v; RF 1712bis, fols. 9r, 18r, 26r; and RF 9154, fol. 25v (in M. Sérullaz, Inventaire général des dessins, vol. 2, cat. nos. 1755, 1756, 1757; and Delacroix, Journal, 1:208, 215, 222, 229, 223 [notes dated February 12, March 7, March 15, April 1, and circa mid-March 1832, respectively]). In one sketchbook he remarks, “One of the three ruined tombs of saints near Tangier is that of Ben Abou’s grandfather. / Un des trois tombeaux de saints en ruine près de Tanger est celui du grand-père de Ben Abou.” Delacroix, “Album du Maroc,” Musée de Condé, Chantilly, MS 390, fols. 74v–73r, and Journal, 1:258. Although this note appears in an album Delacroix used in North Africa, it belongs to a portion of the album that was probably used later, between 1832 and 1834, after the artist had returned to France. See Olmsted, “Reinventing the Protagonist,” 192n112, and Hannoosh, in Delacroix, Journal, 1:256.

94. “Quelquefois la tombe n’est qu’une simple enceinte formée d’humbles pierres posées irrégulièrement par la main d’un ami.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 295.

95. See chapter 2.

96. [Tardieu], “Salon de 1839,” 2.

97. On The Siege of Constantine, see Marrinan, “Schauer der Eroberung”; Zarobell, Empire of Landscape, 39–46; Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 99–112; and Hornstein, Picturing War in France, 109–18.

98. “Cette pensée de danger et de lutte, sur une tombe, est une ingénieuse caractérisation de ce qu’est l’existence dans le désert.” [Tardieu], “Salon de 1839,” 2.

99. On internal Moroccan conflicts, see Bennison, Jihad and Its Interpretations, 48–74; and S. Miller, History of Modern Morocco, 12–17. On internal Algerian conflicts, see Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 92–97, 123–51; and Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 60–63.

100. “Au bas de petits mamelons tumulaires, hérissés des gigantesques plantes d’Afrique, la terre est fraîchement remuée: là s’incline, dans un mouvement grave et pieux un Arabe vêtu de son fidèle costume de combat.” Haussard, “Salon de 1839,” col. 55799.

101. Delacroix felt that even Abd el-Malek was susceptible to greed, which he describes as the only major flaw among Moroccans: “Il n’y a que leur profonde avarice qui donne un démenti à de si belles qualités” (“Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 305).

102. “Si vous saviez comme on vit paisiblement sous le cimeterre des tyrans.” Delacroix to Auguste Jal, Tangier, June 4, 1832, Correspondance, 1:329.

103. Delacroix to Frédéric Villot, Tangier, February 29, 1832, Correspondance, 1:316.

Chapter 4

1. “La bataille d’Isly a été pour M. Delacroix une occasion toute naturelle de montrer à la foule [l’un de] ces grands portraits équestres, dont il avait depuis longtemps rapporté l’esquisse, lors de son voyage au Maroc. Ainsi la bataille d’Isly nous aura valu, du moins, un des beaux tableaux du Salon.—C’est ce que la France en retirera de plus clair.” Blanc, “À la veille du Salon,” 164.

2. See Thoré, “Salon de 1845,” 1.

3. The discussion in this paragraph is based on the following sources: S. Miller, History of Modern Morocco, 17–21; Terrasse, Histoire du Maroc, 1:320–23; Lugan, Histoire du Maroc, 201–4; and Pennell, Morocco Since 1830, 402–49.

4. On matters of the painting’s chronology and production, see Lambert, Histoire du’un tableau; M. Sérullaz, Mémorial de l’exposition Eugène Delacroix, 249–58; Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 370; and Ferrer, “Interaction of Verbal and Pictorial Elements.”

5. Johnson, “Delacroix’s Road to the Sultan,” 189, and Johnson, “Influence of the Journey,” 118, respectively.

6. Trapp, Attainment of Delacroix, 137.

7. Nochlin, “Imaginary Orient,” 187. See also Said, Orientalism.

8. At 3.84 by 3.43 meters (12 feet 7 inches by 11 feet 3 inches), the canvas is the sixth-largest easel painting in Delacroix’s oeuvre. Only The Massacres of Chios (Salon of 1824), The Death of Sardanapalus (Salon of 1827–28), The Battle of Taillebourg (Salon of 1837), The Justice of Trajan (Salon of 1840), and Entry of the Crusaders into Jerusalem (Salon of 1841) are larger.

9. Johnson points out that the wall and the gate were essentially inventions of the artist (“Delacroix’s Road to the Sultan,” 186–89). Ferrer also takes up this issue of manipulation (“Interaction of Verbal and Pictorial Elements,” 185, 190).

10. As Delacroix explains in the text he provided for the Salon catalogue, “Only the sultan is on horseback. The soldiers seen in the distance are cavalry who have dismounted for the occasion.” (Le sultan seul est à cheval. Les soldats qu’on voit sous les armes, au loin, sont des cavaliers qui ont mis pied à terre.) Explication des ouvrages . . . 1845, 295 (cat. no. 438). This formation reflects Delacroix’s experience in Meknes in 1832. Hannoosh notes that the sultan’s practice greatly irritated European diplomats, who were forced to meet the mounted sultan on foot (in Delacroix, Journal, 1:224n201).

11. Delacroix identifies “Muchtar” (Moukhtar el-Jamaï), Amin Bias, and “Mohammed ben Abou” (Mohammed ben Abou ben Abd e-Malek) in Explication des ouvrages . . . 1845, 295 (cat. no. 438). For information on Bias, see Arama, “Journey,” 66n5, and Regard, “Eugène Delacroix et le Comte de Mornay,” 35. For Moukhtar el-Jamaï’s full name, see Pennell, Morocco Since 1830, 19. See chapter 3 for more information on Abd el-Malek.

12. The eighteenth-century kings of France had all been portrayed on horseback. See, for example, Antoine Coysevox’s bas-relief Louis XIV à cheval couronné par la Victoire (1681–82), Charles Cozette’s Louis XV, roi de France (1763), and Jean-François Carteaux, Louis XVI, roi de France (1791), all conserved at the Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Both Napoléon Bonaparte and Louis-Philippe continued this tradition, as the works they commissioned show. For examples, see O’Brien, After the Revolution, and Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe.

13. The painting illustrated here is actually a reduced replica of the original, which has been badly damaged and is unsuitable for reproduction. The copy was painted in 1836, while the original was painted years earlier and exhibited at the Salon of 1831. To complicate matters further, the original (358 × 260 cm), was substantially enlarged by another artist in 1839. See Constans, Musée National du château de Versailles, 2:817, 820.

14. Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe, 7.

15. Joannides, “Delacroix and Modern Literature,” 130–53. If Delacroix borrowed here from Vernet, Vernet returned the favor two years later with his equestrian group portrait of Louis-Philippe and the royal princes in front of the gates of the palace of Versailles (Louis-Philippe and His Sons Riding Out from the Château of Versailles, Salon of 1847, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles).

16. On Vernet, see Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe, 55–56.

17. “Grande ressemblance avec Louis-Philippe, plus jeune.” Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fol. 19v, and Delacroix, Journal, 1:224.

18. “Sous le cimeterre des tyrans.” Delacroix to Jal, Tangier, June 4, 1832, in Correspondance, 1:329.

19. Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe, 3–19.

20. The given title is Muley Abd-err-Rahman, sultan de Maroc, sortant de son palais de Mequinez, entouré de sa garde et de ses principaux officiers (Explication des ouvrages . . . 1845, 295 [cat. no. 438]).

21. Delacroix calls special attention to this object in the catalogue text: “The emperor . . . wears a string of mother-of-pearl beads rolled around his arm” (L’empereur . . . porte un chapelet de nacre roulé autour de son bras) (in Explication des ouvrages . . . 1845, 295 [cat. no. 438]). I am grateful to Michèle Hannoosh for her assistance with this translation.

22. “Un page chargé d’agiter de temps en temps un morceau d’étoffe pour écarter les insectes.” Delacroix, in Explication des ouvrages . . . 1845, 295 (cat. no. 438).

23. “Un cheval barbe d’une grande taille.” Delacroix, in Explication des ouvrages . . . 1845, 295 (cat. no. 438). For a discussion of the development of French equine knowledge and the classification of different breeds in the nineteenth century, see Blomac and Bogros, Arabe, premier cheval de sang, 128–50; Blomac, La gloire et le jeu, 114–29, 143–48; and Roche, Culture équestre de l’Occident, 1:199–211, 221–30; 3:159–92.

24. See Pelletan, “Salon de 1845,” 1; Blanc, “À la veille du Salon,” 164; and Gautier, “Salon de 1845,” 2.

25. On the ‘abid, see S. Miller, History of Modern Morocco, 16; Pennell, Morocco Since 1830, 21; and Laroui, Origines sociales et culturelles, 82.

26. For a more detailed discussion of race in this picture, see Olmsted, “Sultan’s Authority,” 90. See also P. Miller, “‘Des couleurs primitives,’” 274–77.

27. The best resource on Moroccan dress remains the research done by Jean Besancenot in the 1930s and published in a luxury edition in 1942. Some of this work was republished in 2000 as Besancenot, Costumes du Maroc. Information about Moroccan dress can also be found in Delacroix’s notebooks as well as in travel accounts from the period. See, for example, Ali Bey, Voyages d’Ali Bey, vol. 1, 9–10, 24–25.

28. My conclusions about Turkish dress are based on images published in Vanmour, Recueil de cent estampes; Melling and Lacretelle, Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople; and Dupré, Voyage à Athènes, as well as Delacroix’s own discussion of the differences between Turkish, Algerian, and Moroccan dress in “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 276–77.

29. Although the dates of the drawings and the oil sketch have been debated, the consensus is that they were produced in 1832 or 1833. See Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 369; Lambert, Histoire d’un tableau; and Ferrer, “Interaction of Verbal and Pictorial Elements.”

30. Lambert, Histoire d’un tableau, 25.

31. Nochlin, “Imaginary Orient,” 187.

32. Johnson, “Influence of the Journey,” 117.

33. Nochlin, “Imaginary Orient,” 187.

34. See Terrasse, Histoire du Maroc, 1: 211–62; Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 120; and Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 32–45.

35. Inspired by Said, this interpretation was most famously articulated in art-historical scholarship by Nochlin in “Imaginary Orient.”

36. Rautmann, Delacroix, 156.

37. On the various dynasties, their rule, and their significance, see Terrasse, Histoire du Maroc, 2:342–43; Park, Historical Dictionary of Morocco, 211–12; and Pennell, Morocco Since 1830, 11–12. Despite the fact that Abd er-Rahman’s rule had been plagued by constant internal conflicts (which Delacroix may have known by this point), his aristocratic lineage remained unquestioned. For information about conflicts faced by Abd er-Rahman, see Kenbib, “Impact of the French Conquest,” 34–48; Pennell, Morocco Since 1830, 27–31; Bennison, Jihad and Its Interpretations, 48–98; and S. Miller, History of Modern Morocco, 15–17.

38. “C’est la qualité d’empereur ou plutôt celle de descendant de Mahomet qu’ils respectent, plus que la personne revêtue du caractère suprême. Ils changent avec la plus grande facilité le souverain; mais ils ne mettront pas à sa place autre chose [sic] qu’un chérif ou descendant de Mahomet.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 310. Many thanks to William Olmsted for his assistance with this translation.

39. Although his conclusions about this aspect of the painting differ from mine, Trapp also argues that Delacroix’s painting represents the sultanate as an institution (Attainment of Delacroix, 137).

40. For further discussion of the implications of the catalogue text, see Olmsted, “Sultan’s Authority,” 93–94.

41. “Parasol à manche de bois non peint; une petite boule d’or au bout. Rouge en dessus et à compartiments; dessous rouge et vert.” Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fols. 19v–20r, and Journal, 1:224 (note dated March 22, 1832). Delacroix altered his painted version of the parasol, making the exterior green and the underside red instead of depicting alternating panels of red and green.

42. Dakhlia, “Pouvoir du parasol.”

43. In reference to this object, the journal claims that “to appreciate the value of this trophy, it is useful to know that the sultan’s parasol is the sign of command” (pour apprécier la valeur de ce trophée, il est bon de savoir que le parasol du sultan est le signe de commandement) and that “its capture is much more important than that of a flag” (sa prise est beaucoup plus importante que celle d’un drapeau), that other important item of war booty. “Maroc,” October 5, 1844, 78.

44. The woodcut of Sidi Mohammed ben Abd er-Rahman’s parasol clearly establishes its difference from the parasol of his father (as seen in the painting). The print and description in “Maroc,” in L’Illustration, also differ substantially from the description Delacroix recorded in his 1832 notes, particularly in the inclusion of embroidery (which was not present on the parasol he saw). Per the newspaper: “The exterior is of amaranth silk with silver leaf embroidery, intermingled with deep red garnets. This embroidery is admirable in its elegance and accuracy [of execution]; it traces arabesques and flowers. The interior is lined in green silk with gold brocade flowers” (Le dessus est en soie amarantée avec broderies en argent doré, entremêlées de grenats d’un rouge foncé. Ces broderies sont admirable d’élégance et de correction; elles figurent des arabesques et des fleurs. L’intérieur est doublé en soie verte, à fleurs brochées en or). “Maroc,” October 5, 1844, 78.

45. See L’Illustration, September 14, 1844, 16; and “Maroc,” October 5, 1844, 78.

46. Lambert, Histoire d’un tableau, 24–25. Blanc, of course, had suggested this in his criticism of the Salon of 1845 (“À la veille du Salon,” 164).

47. See “Maroc,” September 21, 1844, 33–34.

48. Delacroix refers to the “kaïd Mohammed-Ben-Abou,” “dont le nom a figuré dans la dernière guerre et dans les négociations” (Explication des ouvrages . . . 1845, 295 [cat. no. 438]).

49. See “Correspondance particulière,” 3; Caillé, Mission de Léon Roches, 60n116; Godard, Maroc, 68; Brooks, Memoir of Sir John Drummond Hay, 184–85; and Pennell, Morocco Since 1830, 55.

50. On the exhibition organizers’ request for a text providing historical background, see Olmsted, “Sultan’s Authority,” 94.

51. The criticism of the painting published in 1845 is too lengthy to cite here. For a partial list, see Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 370. The review in L’Algérie is not cited there. See “Salon de 1845,” L’Algérie, April 6, 1845, 2.

52. “S’il est possible que le ministère prenne l’Empereur du Maroc au lieu de Marc-Aurèle, je le préfère infiniment pour toutes sortes de raisons.” Delacroix to M. Cavé, June 20, 1845, Correspondance, 2:219.

53. In a letter to his assistant Louis de Planet, Delacroix remarks on “cette décision dont je me réjouis sincèrement.” Delacroix to Louis de Planet, August 30, 1845, Correspondance, 1:233.

54. Johnson suggests that Delacroix desired the exchange because “he had reservations” about The Death of Marcus Aurelius (Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 281). While this may indeed have been one of the reasons he sought to switch the paintings, it seems clear that his concerns about The Sultan of Morocco were also an important factor. On the connections between The Sultan of Morocco and Marcus Aurelius, see Kahng, Delacroix and the Matter of Finish, 17–22.

55. See the introduction.

56. Blanc, “À la veille du Salon,” 164.

57. “La poésie du désert qui va être engloutie sous la civilisation européenne, plus barbare mille fois que la barbarie elle-même.” Houssaye, “Salon de 1845,” 210. Note that Houssaye makes a play on words: barbarie means barbarism, but Barbarie refers to western North Africa.

58. Collingham, July Monarchy, 253.

59. Durand-Brager’s works are Bombardement de Mogador par l’escadre sous les ordres de S. A. R. Mgr le prince de Joinville (15 août 1844) and Episode du bombardement de Mogador; and Morel-Fatio’s painting is Bombardement de Tanger par l’escadre française sous les ordres de S. A. R. Mgr le prince de Joinville, le 6 août 1844. See Explication des ouvrages . . . 1845, 67, 143 (cat. nos. 534, 535, and 1236).

60. These works are Beaucé’s Charge du colonel Morris: épisode de la bataille d’Isly (13 août 1844), Longuet’s Bataille d’Isly (13 août 1844), Massé’s Bataille d’Isly (13 août 1844), and Larivière’s Portrait en pied de M. le maréchal Bugeaud, duc d’Isly. See Explication des ouvrages . . . 1845, 13, 136, 142, 121 (cat. nos. 64, 1112, 1174, and 979). For discussion of Larivière’s portrait, see Olmsted, “Sultan’s Authority,” 95–96.

61. Jacques Guiaud’s three untitled paintings all appeared in the same entry and were described in the catalogue text as views of Sidi Mohammed’s tent. See Explication des ouvrages . . . 1845, 98 (cat. no. 793).

62. Thoré gave the most precise description of the salon carré, in which he notes that Vernet’s painting “occupies the entire paneled area that faces the entry door in the large room” (occupe tout le lambris qui fait face à la porte d’entrée dans le grand salon) (“Salon de 1845,” 1).

63. Guépoulain (“Salon de 1845,” 208–9) and the anonymous reviewer for L’Indépendant (“Salon de 1845(2e article),” 2), among others, note that Delacroix’s painting was hung on the wall opposite Vernet’s painting (that is, on the same wall as the entry).

64. On the capture of the Smala and the events of 1843, see Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 194. Some of this information was also provided in the Salon catalogue.

65. As Julien points out, the Duc d’Aumale himself could have been captured, which would have been a devastating setback for the French (Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 194).

66. According to Marrinan, during a visit to Versailles on August 3, 1843, Vernet had been informally commissioned by Louis-Philippe, but the official commission itself was not awarded until November. Marrinan also offers evidence that the king advised the artist closely during the production of the painting (“Schauer der Eroberung,” 268, 202n19).

67. Critics who praised Vernet for being gifted in all genres include Delécluze, “Salon de 1845,” 1–2; Desbarolles, “Lettres sur le Salon de 1845,” 349–50; Haussard, “Salon de 1845,” 1–2; and Mantz, “Salon de 1845,” 178. For more on the critical response to Vernet’s painting, see Hornstein, Picturing War in France, 121–25.

68. Vernet’s interpretation was supported by numerous paintings of battles and related themes in Algeria. These included Sebastien Cornu’s Combat de l’Ouâd-Halleg (31 décembre 1839), Alexandre Genet’s Vue générale de Tlemcen et de ses environs (with an encounter between General Bertrand Clauzel and Algerians fleeing the French army), Eugène Ginain’s Femme arabe entraînant du champ de batailles le corps de son fiancé, and Marie-Alexandre Longuet’s Prise d’un retranchement par le 53e de ligne (17 octobre 1844) (of the French battle with Algerian Kabyles) See Explication des ouvrages . . . 1845, 48, 84, 87, 135 (cat. nos. 361, 696, 710, 1111).

69. See the lengthy description provided in the Salon catalogue for Vernet’s Prise de la smahla [sic] d’Abd-el-Kader à Taguin (16 mai 1843) (Explication des ouvrages . . . 1845, 196–202 [cat. no. 1628]). On the spahis more generally, see Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 274–75. For discussions of this painting as part of a campaign to promote Louis-Philippe’s sons, see Marrinan, “Schauer der Eroberung,” and Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 112–18.

70. On Yusuf, see Noulens, Spahis, 15, and Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 93. On Vernet’s relationship with Yusuf, see Olmsted, “Reinventing the Protagonist,” 248–49, and Sessions, “Horace Vernet en Algérie,” 267–71. There are widespread inconsistencies in the spelling of Yusuf’s name, and his surname has yet to be conclusively established.

71. On the tensions between the government and the army as the conquest unfolded, see Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 64–163, and Collingham, July Monarchy, 240–57. Conflict about the French mission in Algeria would erupt again within months of the Salon’s opening. The year 1845 was a difficult one for the French conquest. First, Algerian resistance sprang to life again with the emergence of small but forceful pockets of resistance in areas thought to be contained. Second, news of Bugeaud’s increasingly brutal tactics in Algeria created a scandal in France. One of the most controversial events was his use of fires to asphyxiate hundreds of Algerians who had taken refuge in caves.

72. As the Salon criticism pointed out, Vernet’s painting also glamorized French officers like Lieutenant-Colonel Michel Morris. See, for example, “Salon de 1845,” L’Illustration, March 15, 1845, 39. On nationalism and the desire of French citizens to recapture the glorious days of Napoléon’s imperial army, see Collingham, July Monarchy; Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 136–43; and Bertaud, “Virilité militaire,” 185–89.

73. See Sandoz, Théodore Chassériau, cat. no. 101; Bénédite, Théodore Chassériau, 1:234–41; Guégan, Chassériau, cat. no. 134; and P. Miller, “Théodore Chassériau,” 113–15.

74. Guégan, Chassériau, cat. no. 134, and De Delacroix à Renoir, cat. no. 29, by Peter Miller. Contemporary accounts of Ali ben Hamed provide somewhat contradictory information about the khalifa’s status before his promotion. See “Chefs arabes,” January 2, 1845, 1–3; and the accounts collected De Delacroix à Renoir, cat. no. 29. This state of affairs complicates Nochlin’s assertion that Ali ben Hamed was the “cat’s-paw,” or dupe, of the French (“Imaginary Orient,” 187).

75. Field Marshal Sylvain-Charles, comte de Valée, started the practice when he was governor general of Algeria (1837–40), and Bugeaud continued it during his tenure as field marshal and then governor general (1840–47). See Julien, Histoire d’Algérie contemporaine, 146–48, 187; Jardin and Tudesq, Restoration and Reaction, 161–65; and Sullivan, Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, 102–3. The strategy of using French awards to encourage loyalty was advocated by Alexis de Tocqueville, a close associate of Chassériau’s brother and a public proponent of colonization. On Chassériau’s relationship with Tocqueville, see P. Miller, “Théodore Chassériau,” 51–56; and Mélonio, “Choc des civilisations,” 171–96.

76. “On prétend que le khalifa Ali-Ben-Ba-Ahmed, lors de la prise de Constantine, n’était qu’un simple cavalier dans le Zemoul du bey Ahmed.” “Chefs arabes,” January 12, 1845, 2. The Zemoul was one of the many tribes of the Constantine region, and Ahmad Bey had taken over leadership of Algeria after the capture of Hussein Dey, regent of Algiers, in 1830. Ahmad Bey’s resistance movement lost momentum after 1837, and he was eventually captured by the French in 1848. See Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 55–57.

77. Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 222–29.

Chapter 5

1. The former will be discussed below. For examples of the latter, see Jobert, Delacroix, 140–75; Rautmann, Delacroix, 136–68; and Trapp, Attainment of Delacroix, 111–41.

2. “Je n’ai commencé à faire quelque chose de passable, dans mon voyage d’Afrique, qu’au moment où j’avais assez oublié les petits détails pour ne me rappeler dans mes tableaux que le côté frappant et poétique.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:691 (entry for October 17, 1853).

3. Trapp, Attainment of Delacroix, 141.

4. O’Brien, Exiled in Modernity, 101; see also pp. 75, 107.

5. Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies,” 87.

6. Jobert, Delacroix, 172, and Allard and Fabre, Delacroix, 209–13.

7. See R. Brown, “Formation of Delacroix’s Hero,” and Pétry, “Héros romantique.”

8. On history painting, landscape, and genre in the 1850s and 1860s, see Gotlieb, Plight of Emulation; House, “Manet’s Maximilian,” 87–111; Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire, chaps. 17–19; Loyrette, “History Painting”; Tinterow, “Realist Landscape”; Green, Spectacle of Nature; and Adams, Barbizon School and the Origins of Impressionism, 127, 132–74, 182–97. On the rise of bourgeois patronage and the dealer-critic system, see White and White, Canvases and Careers, 76–110; Green, “Dealing in Temperaments”; and Miquel, Art et argent.

9. For an excellent account of these phenomena, see Marrinan, Romantic Paris, 271–335, 365–78.

10. Jobert, Delacroix, 258.

11. Delacroix uses the phrase “toujours sur l’emploi du modèle et sur l’imitation” as the heading for the passage in which the sentence about North Africa appears (Journal, 1:691 [entry for October 17, 1853]). “Toujours” refers to an earlier section of writing entitled “On the use of the model” (De l’emploi du modèle) (1:686–89, 691 [entries for October 12 and 17, 1853]).

12. Hannoosh points out the differences between Rousseau’s observation and Delacroix’s interpretation of it (in Delacroix, Journal, 1:691n277 [entries for October 12 and 17, 1853]).

13. Delacroix, Journal, 1:691 (entry for October 17, 1853):

Le nez sur le paysage, entouré d’arbres et de lieux charmants, mon paysage est lourd, trop fait, peut-être plus vrai dans le détail, mais sans accord avec le sujet. Quand Courbet a fait le fond de la femme qui se baigne, il l’a copié scrupuleusement d’après une étude que j’ai vue à côté de son chevalet. Rien n’est plus froid; c’est un ouvrage de marqueterie.—Je n’ai commencé à faire quelque chose de passable, dans mon voyage d’Afrique, qu’au moment où j’avais assez oublié les petits détails pour ne me rappeler dans mes tableaux que le côté frappant et poétique; jusque-là, j’étais poursuivi par l’amour de l’exactitude, que le plus grand nombre prend pour la vérité.

14. For more on Delacroix’s broad conception of the term “realism,” see Olmsted, “In Defense of Painting.”

15. Delacroix, Journal, 1:339 (entry for January 29, 1847).

16. “Il y a dans la peinture autre chose que l’exactitude et le rendu précis d’après le modèle.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:427–28 (entry for March 5, 1849).

17. “La froide exactitude n’est pas l’art.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:528 (entry for July 18, 1850).

18. “L’indépendance de l’imagination doit être entière devant le tableau.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:640 (entry for April 26, 1853).

19. Hannoosh, in Delacroix, Journal, 1:339n76. See also Delacroix, Journal, 1:1092, 1120 (entries for January 28 and March 5, 1857).

20. “Nous sommes étonnés de l’anéantissement qu’amène la mort—de l’oubli profond de ceux qui ne sont plus.—Nous-mêmes nous nous oublions.—Je revois mes dessins de Maroc—mes impressions sont celles d’un autre; mille détails qui me sont échappés et qui parfois reviennent à peu près me le prouvent.—Le souvenir que nous croyons avoir est trompeur.—Les portraits des morts faits après la mort paraissent bientôt ressemblants, parce que l’imagination qui n’a que des souvenirs vagues se prend de suite à cette réalité.” Delacroix, Journal, 2:1641 (note dated ca. 1844).

21. “Passage de rivière en prenant toutes les figures telles qu’elles sont dans mes croquis.” Delacroix, Journal, 2:1517 (note dated ca. 1832–34). Hannoosh dates the folio on which this note appears to 1832, although it is clear from the entries and annotations that the list was made either at the end of the trip or shortly thereafter.

22. Sérullaz notes the absence of any close drawings from 1832 (Sérullaz, Pomarède, and Rishel Dernières années, 258–59 [cat. no. 105]).

23. “Parti par un beau soleil au matin. Côtoyé d’abord la petite rivière. Les figures éclairées de côté par le soleil levant. Montagnes nettes sur le fond. Blanc des étoffes et couleurs très vives. Ciel bleu.” Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fol. 15r: (in M. Sérullaz, Inventaire général des dessins, vol. 2, cat. no. 1756, and Delacroix, Journal, 1:220 [entry for March 14, 1832]). Hannoosh notes that the river in question is the Rdom (in Delacroix, Journal, 1:220n178).

24. In Collections de San Donato, the painting is described as a sunset scene commissioned by Anatole Demidoff (cat. no. 27).

25. Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fol. 15r, and Journal, 1:221, 221n183 (entry for March 14, 1832).

26. Bennison, Jihad and Its Interpretations, 71.

27. “Chaque gouverneur de province nous remettait à celui qui suivait, et notre escorte, déjà très-considérable, s’augmentait de la garde de ces nouveaux venus. De temps en temps nous entendions quelques balles oubliées qui sifflaient au milieu de la réjouissance. Nous avons eu entre autres un passage de rivière, bien entendu sans ponts et sans bateaux, qui peut être comparé au passage du Rhin pour la quantité de coups de fusils qui nous accueillaient.” Delacroix to Pierret, Meknes, March 16, 1832, Correspondance, 1:321.

28. Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fol. 28v, and Journal, 1:232 (note dated April 7, 1832).

29. Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 1712bis, fols. 13v–14r, and Journal, 1:219 (note dated March 12, 1832).

30. See Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. L169, and Johnson, Paintings, Fourth Supplement, cat. no. L169 (where he says it should be renumbered as cat. no. 399a).

31. See Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. nos. 401, 416, 417. While outside the scope of the present study, Delacroix’s practice of making copies and variants is an emerging area of scholarly investigation. See Kahng, Delacroix and the Matter of Finish.

32. See the following in Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3: Moroccan Chieftain Signaling to His Companions (1851, cat. no. 386); two versions of Moroccan Horseman Crossing a River (both ca. 1852, cat. nos. 387, 387a [formerly L167]); Arab Seated by a Fire and His Horse (probably 1854, cat. no. 397); Arab About to Saddle His Horse (1857, cat. no. 404); and Wounded Arab and His Horse (1859, cat. no. 411). The painting Arab Horseman at the Gallop (1849, cat. no. 384) depicts a man wearing the distinctive leather thongs around the hood of his burnous that Delacroix associated with Algerian dress, so it is more properly considered an Algerian image rather than a Moroccan one. See Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 277, for his comments about Algerian clothing.

33. When this work was first exhibited in 1860, it was called Arab Chieftain Calling His Riders, but Delacroix refers to it as Arab on Horseback Descending a Mountain (Arabe à cheval descendant une montagne) when he was first working on it in 1849. See Delacroix, Journal, 1:450n214 (entry for June 17, 1849). The exhibition in question was organized by Francis Petit in March 1860 (Delacroix, Journal, 2:1333).

34. See Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. nos. 384, 386, 387, 396, 397, 398, 404, and 411.

35. On the impact of Delacroix’s health and mural projects on his choice of smaller easel paintings, see Jobert, Delacroix, 257–58.

36. The North African scenes (given with the catalogue numbers from Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3) include five pictures painted for Emmanuel Weill (cat. nos. 381, 390, 392, 402, 403), six for Louis (or Jacob) Tedesco (cat. nos. 391, 393, 408, 415, 418, 419), and two for Charles Estienne (cat. nos. 413, 414). The hunt pictures in question were painted for Weill (cat. nos. 193, 194, L124).

37. O’Brien, Exiled in Modernity, 101, 108.

38. See Kerlouégan, “Adieu aux armes,” and Bertaud, “Virilité militaire,” 181–85.

39. Delacroix calls the soldiers “brutes,” “ces moutons habillés en loups,” and “automates.” He then writes, “Où est la force, où est l’adresse dans ce stupide jeu; la force, le courage pour attaquer, presser et défaire un farouche ennemi, l’adresse pour se préserver soi-même de ses coups? Quoi, vous venez vous planter devant un autre animal aussi intimidé que vous, et à distance raisonnable vous vous envoyez philosophiquement des balles de plomb et de fer, sans aucune défense contre ces coups qui vous sont renvoyés, et vous persuadez à votre troupeau à plumets et à épaulettes que c’est là se couvrir de la gloire!” Delacroix, Journal, 1:833–34 (entry for September 15, 1854).

40. “L’héroïsme consiste à approcher l’ennemi de manière à ce que le courage personnel serve à quelque chose.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:834 (entry for September 15, 1854).

41. “Cette masse intimidée . . . devient ainsi . . . la seule force des armées modernes; c’est par sa masse qu’elle opère. Le courage des hommes d’action y devient presque inutile. . . . Il me semble que des tirailleurs réunis en petits pelotons seulement, exercés au tir, mais en même temps à se réunir promptement pour attaquer de près avec impétuosité, aurai[en]t plus d’effet que ces murailles de chair qui renvoient au hasard et de loin des coups précipités et sans justesse.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:834 (entry for September 15, 1854).

42. Bennison, Jihad and Its Interpretations, 117–23, and S. Miller, History of Modern Morocco, 18–19.

43. See Bennison, Jihad and Its Interpretations, 114–23, and Pennell, Morocco Since 1830, 49–53.

44. “La cavalerie ne me semble bonne que pour tenir la campagne, éclairer les démarches et harceler, ou pour suivre un ennemi déjà défait et mis en fuite, et l’empêcher de se réunir.” Delacroix, Journal, 2:1717 (entry for ca. September 1854).

45. On Delacroix’s earlier fascination with cats, see Trapp, Attainment of Delacroix, 203–6. On the hunt scenes, see Finlay, “Animal Themes in the Painting”; Kliman, “Delacroix’s Lions and Tigers”; O’Brien, Exiled in Modernity, 113-46; A. Sérullaz, Pomarède, and Rishel, Delacroix, 77–81.

46. On Delacroix’s engagement with Rubens’s hunt paintings, see Bjurström, Delacroix’ lejonjakter, 24–25; Finlay, “Animal Themes in the Painting,” 204–6; Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 198; Mras, Eugène Delacroix’s Theory of Art, 70; O’Brien, Exiled in Modernity, 128–30; and Olmsted, “In Defense of Painting.”

47. On the landscape, see A. Sérullaz, Pomarède, and Rishel, Delacroix, cat. no. 12. On Delacroix’s understanding of the differences between Moroccan clothing and Turkish or Ottoman garb, see chapters 2 and 4; and Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 276–77.

48. Petroz confirms the color of the horse’s coat, calling it “alezan,” though it is more properly identified as “alezan cuivré” (“Exposition universelle,” 2).

49. Delacroix to Pierret, Tangier, February 8, 1832, Correspondance, 1:311.

50. See Laroui, Origines sociales et culturelles, 31, and Besancenot, Costumes du Maroc, 14, 18.

51. For Convulsionists of Tangier, see chapter 2; for Women of Algiers, see the introduction.

52. Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 395.

53. See chapter 3, and Lamartine, Souvenirs, impressions, pensées et paysages, 7:72.

54. “Aussitôt qu’un enfant peut se tenir sur un coursier, on lui fait monter des poulains d’abord, puis des chevaux.” Daumas and Abd el-Kader, Chevaux du Sahara, 475. Despite the geographical specificity of the title, Daumas’s book actually deals with the equine culture of Algerian Arabs.

55. “La bête patiente se prête avec une complaisance distraite à ces essais d’une équitation précoce, qu’une femme, placée au second plan, considère avec une tendresse faite d’inquiétude et de joie.” Mantz, “Salon de 1855,” 172.

56. Gautier, Beaux-Arts en Europe, 1:183.

57. “La simplicité d’effet donne à cette dernière toile un caractère patriarcal très bien senti. Un homme vêtu d’une robe bleue, la tête couverte d’un burnous blanc, tient le bras d’un enfant qui, monté sur un grand cheval alezan, essaie de se tenir en équilibre. Sur le second plan, la mère et l’aïeul, placés à l’entrée d’une tente, regardent cette première leçon avec une tendre sollicitude.” Petroz, “Exposition universelle,” 2.

58. In the entry for June 28, Delacroix notes working on the painting. The critique of the modern family was written the following day, June 29, 1854 (Journal, 1:787–88): “Ce qu’on appelait la famille est aujourd’hui un vain mot. La suppression, dans nos mœurs, de la vénération, de la crainte même, du père par la familiarité que permettent les usages en est le principal dissolvant. Le partage égal achève de dissoudre tous les liens qui unissent les membres d’une famille. Le lieu de la naissance, l’habitation paternelle est aliénée naturellement après la mort du père. On sacrifie, dira-t-on, à d’autres dieux: le bien de l’humanité est devenu la passion de tous ceux qui ne peuvent vivre avec leurs frères issus du même sang dont ils sont formés.”

59. M. Perrot, From the Fires of Revolution, 113.

60. See Hannoosh, “Painter’s Impressions of Modernity,” and O’Brien, Exiled in Modernity, 10–12.

61. Stéphant, “‘Chili,’ ou le frère ‘oublié,’” 178, and Hannoosh, in Delacroix, Journal, 1:80–81n16, 2:2356.

62. “Je dis aussi qu’il y a plus de mérite, dans un temps de décadence, de revenir à la simplicité et à la nature.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:776 (entry for May 27, 1854).

63. Here my argument departs from that of Allard and Fabre, Delacroix, 180.

64. The Pyrénées sketchbook is conserved in Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 52997. See Salé, Eugène Delacroix.

65. “Cela m’a rappelé de jeunes années et de bons moments.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:767 (entry for May 20, 1854).

66. Delacroix, Journal, 2:1718 (note dated ca. September 1854).

67. “Ceux-ci, comme leurs cavaliers, semblent respirer l’amour du danger et de la gloire. Dans ces mêlées si poétiques où on les voit se cabrer, mordre, hennir, où les poitrails s’entrechoquent, où les crinières confondues et entrelacées brillent sous le soleil le plus vif à travers la poussière du combat, on admire encore la science avec laquelle le peintre les dessine, et la beauté de leurs proportions. Ce mélange si rare de la force et de l’élégance est sans doute le dernier terme de l’art.” Delacroix, “Gros,” 183.

68. Shortly after he started keeping a journal again, Delacroix wrote about the beautiful: “Le beau est assurément la rencontre de toutes les convenances” (Journal, 1:348 [entry for February 14, 1847]). For discussion of Delacroix’s theories of beauty within the context of his artistic and theoretical practices, see Mras, Eugène Delacroix’s Theory of Art, 99–105.

69. “L’hippopotame qui est le héros de l’action est une bête informe qu’aucune exécution ne pourrait rendre supportable.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:333 (entry for January 25, 1847).

70. Silvestre, Histoire des artistes vivants, 66. As with all second-hand accounts, this should be taken with a grain of salt, but given Delacroix’s other descriptions of Moroccan horses, which are discussed below, this one can be accepted as accurate. Per Hannoosh, the first edition of Silvestre’s biography has been lost (in Delacroix, Journal, 1:750n81).

71. “Autre plaisir que j’avais encore: l’étude des chevaux arabes. Ils ont sous le ciel natal un caractère particulier de fierté, d’énergie, qu’ils perdent en changeant de climat; il leur arrive assez souvent de se débarrasser violemment de leur cavalier afin de se livrer entre eux de sanglantes batailles qui durent des heures entières: il se prennent à belles dents, comme des tigres, et rien ne peut les séparer; les souffles rauques et enflammés qui sortent de leurs naseaux écarlates, comme la respiration des locomotives, leurs crins épars ou empâtés de sang, leurs jalousies féroces, leurs rancunes mortelles: tout en eux, attitudes et caractère, s’élève jusqu’à la poésie.” Delacroix, quoted in Silvestre, “Eugène Delacroix,” 66.

72. “Deux de ces chevaux ont pris dispute, et j’ai vu la bataille la plus acharnée qu’on puisse imaginer: tout ce que Gros et Rubens ont inventé de furies n’est que peu de chose auprès.” Delacroix to Pierret and Guillemardet, Tangier, February 8, 1832, Correspondance, 1:311.

73. “C’était, sous sa forme de cheval, une bête aussi féroce qu’un tigre: il passait pour avoir un jour tué un soldat, et une autre fois, ayant pris à belles dents un homme qui passait dans le marché, le malheureux n’avait dû son salut qu’à la prestesse avec laquelle il s’était dégagé de sa gélabia, d’où il était sorti comme d’un fourreau en le laissant en proie à l’animal qui, mordant et piétinant avec fureur, l’avait réduit en mille brins.” Delacroix, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc,” 290–91.

74. For an interesting interpretation of Delacroix’s attitudes toward tigers, see Kliman, “Delacroix’s Lions and Tigers.”

75. Johnson points out that, while the first mention of the painting appears on a list of potential subjects compiled by Delacroix in 1854, the artist apparently did not start work on it until 1856. Johnson also describes the 1832 horse fight as the inspiration for this painting (Paintings, vol. 3, cat. no. 413).

76. A. Sérullaz emphasizes the transformation of the scene from outdoors to indoors (in A. Sérullaz, Pomarède, and Rishel, Delacroix, cat. no. 108).

77. In one of his 1832 sketchbooks, Delacroix writes, “le gris a passé sa tête sur le cou de l’autre. Pendant [un temps] infini impossible de lui faire lâcher prise.” He includes a very schematic sketch in the middle of his written account. See Delacroix, Paris, Musée du Louvre, RF 39050, fol. 10v, and Journal, 203 (note dated January 29, 1832).

78. Note that coat color bears no definitive relationship to breed among French, English, or Arab horses. In this painting, Delacroix’s animals could belong to any one of these three broad equine families. Breed is indicated by body size, bone structure, and shapes of features, such as ears and nostrils. See Barbié de Préaudeau, “Standards de l’arabe et du barbe,” 283.

79. See Delacroix, Journal, 1:1135 (entry for April 1, 1857).

80. Johnson, Paintings, vol. 3, cat. nos. 391, 400, 415.

81. A. Sérullaz notes the pendant aspect of these two paintings (in A. Sérullaz, Pomarède, and Rishel, Delacroix, cat. no. 107).

82. Bouchet, Cheval à Paris, 248–54; Roche, Culture équestre de l’Occident, 1:25–56, 100–120; and Weil, Precarious Partners, 4–10.

83. On Delacroix’s critiques of realism in the 1850s, see Olmsted, “In Defense of Painting.”

84. Trapp, Attainment of Delacroix, 220.

85. On this text, see Roche, Culture équestre de l’Occident, 3:225, and Weil, Precarious Partners, 53–59.

86. “Même force, même précision, et malgré l’impression de force et d’action, un peu d’immobilité, par suite de l’étude extrême des détails probablement.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:585 (entry for March 8, 1852).

87. “Je n’ai commencé à faire quelque chose de passable, dans mon voyage d’Afrique, qu’au moment où j’avais assez oublié les petits détails pour ne me rappeler dans mes tableaux que le côté frappant et poétique.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:691 (entry for October 17, 1853). As noted above, this passage appears in a discussion of imitation. On the larger context of Delacroix’s conception of imitation, see Mras, Eugène Delacroix’s Theory of Art, 56.

88. “Il n’y faut pas apporter la perfection de dessin des naturalistes, surtout dans la grande peinture et la grande sculpture. Géricault trop savant. Rubens et Gros supérieurs.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:1073 (entry for January 15, 1857).

89. On Géricault’s horses, see Lasalle, “Course des chevaux libres”; Germer, “Pleasurable Fear”; Guilbaut, “Théodore Géricault,” 4–17; and Weil, Precarious Partners, 24–43.

90. “La froide exactitude n’est pas l’art.” Delacroix, Journal, 1:528 (entry for July 18, 1850).

91. Delacroix, Journal, 1:678 (entry for July 10, 1853). See also his comments about Plowing in the Nivernais in his entry for March 5, 1849 (1:427–28).

Conclusion

1. The historical analysis that follows here is based on S. Miller, History of Modern Morocco, 24–27; Pennell, Morocco Since 1830, 64–65; and Terrasse, Histoire du Maroc, 2:325–28.

2. S. Miller, History of Modern Morocco, 27.

3. S. Miller, History of Modern Morocco, 56–88, 151–59.

4. Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics.

5. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 175–83.

6. S. Miller, History of Modern Morocco, 162–68.

7. See Ubl, “Eugène Delacroix’s Jewish Wedding,” and Noon and Riopelle, “Orientalism.”

8. See Porterfield, Allure of Empire, 150–51.

9. Dakhlia, “Pouvoir du parasol.”

10. “Tbourida,” Unesco: Intangible Cultural Heritage, accessed August 10, 2022, https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/tbourida-01483. See also Pouillon, “Sur les ‘fantasias’ marocaines,” and Talley, “Gunpowder Games.”

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Vanmour, Jean-Baptiste. Recueil de cent estampes représentant différentes nations du Levant. Paris, 1720.

Vergnaud, Amand-Denis. Manuel d’équitation à l’usage des deux sexes. Paris: Roret, 1834.

Vernet, Horace. “Des anciens hébreux et des arabes modernes.” L’Artiste, August 15, 1848, 233–35.

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Index

Italicized page references indicate illustrations. Endnotes are referenced with “n” followed by the endnote number.

Abd al-Aziz (Moroccan sultan), 153

Abd el-Kader (Algerian resistance leader), 7, 95, 97, 112–15, 138

Abd el-Malek, Mohammed ben Abou ben

chivalric ideal and, 84, 87–88

Delacroix’s admiration for, 12, 84, 8–90, 94, 98, 152

Delacroix’s paintings of, 84–85, 85, 88–92, 89, 131, 170n67

equestrian skill of, 88

leadership of, 12, 84, 85, 87, 88, 94, 109, 144, 152

punishment for would-be assassin, 76, 85, 169n40

virtues of, 84–88, 152

in The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, 98, 109, 172n11

See also Moroccan Royal Cavalry

Abd er-Rahman ben Hicham (Moroccan sultan)

clothing worn by, 49

death of (1859), 152

dignified bearing of, 51, 165n36

on fall of Algiers, 75

French relations with, 3, 7, 158n23

influence in Maghreb, 120

lineage of, 105–6, 173n37

mediation of Delacroix’s experiences in Morocco, 8, 77–79

military reform efforts of, 85, 170n71

Mornay’s meeting with, 104, 104

ostrich given to Louis-Philippe, 130

political authority of, 98, 100–101, 104–6, 108–10, 120, 152, 172n10

support for Algerian resistance movement, 7, 97, 109

See also The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage

Aïssaoua (Sufi sect), 52–56, 165nn42–45, 165n51

Alawite dynasty, 105, 153

Algeria

battle imagery of, 175n68

civilizing mission in, 10, 61, 158n39

clothing in, 43, 62, 117, 158n20, 177n32

colonization by France, 7, 10, 55, 105, 110–17, 119–20, 158n41, 168n31, 175n71

internal conflicts, 93–94, 171n99

invasion by France (1830), 3, 4, 7, 11, 75, 78

resistance movement in, 7, 9, 95, 97, 109, 112–15, 120, 175n71, 175n76

as satellite regency of Ottoman Empire, 3, 7, 10, 105

Vernet’s trips to, 4, 62, 157n9, 166n80

warfare, approach to, 74

Ali, Mohammed (Ottoman viceroy of Egypt), 29

Allard, Sébastien, 122, 147

Anderson, Benedict, 153

antiheroism, 11, 16, 19, 22, 25–26, 31, 41

Arab horses, 12, 32, 80–81, 101, 162nn71–73

armée d’Afrique (army of Africa), 8, 73–74, 92, 114

Assyrians, 26, 28, 31, 161n50

attire. See clothing

Auguste, Jules-Robert, 33–34, 36, 162n78, 163n88

Augustus (Roman emperor), 48, 51, 165n29

Aved, Joseph: Mehemet Said Pacha, Bey of Roumélie, 103

Balzac, Honoré de, 52

barb horses, 80–81, 83, 101, 142–143, 146, 149, 152

Baudelaire, Charles, 25, 39, 40

Beaucé, Adolphe, 111, 174n60

Beauharnais, Eugène de, 19

beau idéal, 61, 166n72

Bellangé, Hippolyte, 160n19

Benjamin, Roger, 153

Bennison, Amira, 75, 77–78

Besancenot, Jean, 173n27

Betzer, Sarah, 62

Bey, Ahmad, 175n76

Bias, Amin, 98, 172n11

Blanc, Charles, 95, 101, 110–11, 174n46

Blomac, Nicole de, 32

Bohrer, Frederick, 6

Bonheur, Rosa: Horse Fair, 149

bourgeois patronage, 122, 176n8

Braudel, Fernand, 7

Brown, Roy Howard, 17

Brummell, George “Beau,” 40, 45

Brutus, 43, 60, 64

Bugeaud, Thomas-Robert, 111, 115, 175n71, 175n75

Burel, Antoine, 69–70, 74, 77, 168n14

Burty, Philippe, 54–55

Byron, George Gordon, 16, 159n8, 161n48

Cato of Utica, 43, 60, 64

cavalry

Arab horses in, 162n72

French, 19, 21, 32, 74

Ottoman, 17, 70

See also Moroccan Royal Cavalry

Cavé, François, 110

Champmartin, Charles-Émile Callande de: Massacre of the Janissaries, 28, 31, 161n51

Charles X (king of France), 3, 29, 152

Charlet, Nicolas Toussaint, 160n19

Chassériau, Théodore: Portrait of Ali ben Hamed, Khalifa of Constantine, 116–17, 119, 119–20

Chateaubriand, François-René de, 30

Chauvin, Auguste, 31

Chimol, Abraham Ben, 4

chivalric ideal, 84, 87–88, 122

Christianity, 26, 61, 90

classicism, 41–44, 48–49, 51–65, 151, 164n11

clothing

Algerian, 43, 62, 117, 158n20, 177n32

French, 9, 11, 31, 40, 45, 49

as marker of historical era, 39

Moroccan, 11, 42–51, 47, 50, 101–2, 158n20, 173n27

Turkish, 11, 29, 31, 35–40, 37, 45, 102, 163nn87–88

composure. See sangfroid

costume. See clothing

courage, 9, 12, 32, 70, 74, 79, 85, 88, 92, 135–36

Courbet, Gustave, 12, 123

courses de poudre (gunpowder races), 69–70, 74–80, 77, 83, 87–88, 131, 153–55, 167n11, 168nn29–30

Crusades, 90–91, 91

Dakhlia, Jocelyne, 106–7, 154

dandy, 9, 25, 31, 39–40, 45, 158n32

Daumas, Eugène, 138, 178n54

Dauzats, Adrien, 155

David, Jacques-Louis

The Anger of Achilles, 56, 57

Intervention of the Sabine Women, 59

The Oath of the Horatii, 56, 59

dealer-critic system, 122, 176n8

Decamps, Alexandre

defense of Convulsionists of Tangier by, 55

future research possibilities on, 153

The Punishment of the Hooks, 92, 93

decapitation, 23–24, 76

Delacroix, Charles, 19, 23–24, 141

Delacroix, Eugène

albums from North Africa, 4, 157n10

artistic influences on, 19, 28–29, 33–34, 40, 70, 161n52, 172n15

classicism and, 42, 164n11

conflation of Turks with Moroccans, 11, 15, 41

copies and variants of works made by, 177n31

critique of family, 140

death of (1863), 4, 152

equine battle experienced by, 83, 143, 144

on exposure to natural world, 56–57, 74, 79, 168n26

fascination with large cats, 137, 178n45, 179n74

on French military, 19, 135–36, 142

gender of figures in North African works, 3, 157n2

on Greek war for independence, 16, 17

harems and, 1, 157n5, 158n17

on imitation, 123, 124, 150, 179n87

interpretations of North Africa, 9–11, 49

male agency in works by, 8–9, 59, 60, 73, 124

memoir drafted by, 10–11, 15, 43, 159nn46–47

Moroccan clothing and, 11, 42–51, 47, 50

moussem procession witnessed by, 54–55

mural projects, 60, 122, 133, 152, 166n68, 177n35

pictorial devices used by, 17, 98, 105

Pyrénées sketchbook, 141, 178n64

on realism, 123–24, 141–44, 147–50, 152, 176n14, 179n83

on revitalizing effects of horsemanship, 67

Saidian interpretations of, 4–6

trip to England (1825), 35, 80, 138, 166n62

trip to North Africa (1832), 1, 3–4, 10–11, 41, 157n8

Turkish clothing and, 11, 35–39, 37, 45, 163nn87–88

Turks as represented by, 11, 15–26, 18, 20, 30, 30–31, 41, 160n17

watercolors made for Mornay, 4, 54, 84, 157n11

Delacroix, Eugène, works by

Arab Camp at Night, 149

Arab Cavalry Practicing a Charge, 131, 132

Arab Chieftain Signaling to His Companions, 133, 134, 177n33

Arab Horseman at the Gallop, 177n32

Arab Horseman Practicing a Charge, 80

Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable, 83, 144–47, 145, 149, 179nn75–76

Arab Players, 149

Arab Soldier by a Grave, 81, 82, 92–94, 111, 171nn91–93

Arabs Playing Chess, 149

Arabs Traveling, 138

The Arrival in Meknes, 75

The Battle of Nancy: Death of Charles the Bold, 70

The Battle of Poitiers, 70

Collision of Arab Horsemen, 69, 71, 83, 144, 169n61

Convulsionists of Tangier, 52–56, 54, 138, 165n41, 165n51

Count Charles de Mornay in Ambassadorial Dress, 48, 48, 164n26

Course de Poudre Outside Meknes, 77

Courtyard in Morocco, 56

The Death of Marcus Aurelius, 110, 174n54

The Death of Sardanapalus, 6, 11, 16, 26–31, 27, 40, 41, 161n56

Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, 90–91, 91

Figure of Horse, Rear Leg (Profile), 35

Four Sketches of Arab Men, 52

Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, 17

Holster, Powder Horn, and Two Small Pouches, 38

Horses at a Trough in Morocco, 147

Horses Coming out of the Sea, 147, 147

Jewish Musicians from Mogador, 149

Jewish Wedding in Morocco, 154

L’empereur Muley-Abd-el-Rahman, 108, 109

Liberty Leading the People, 12

Lion Hunt, 137, 137

Mohammed ben Abou ben Abd el-Malek, 84–85, 85, 170n67

The Moroccan Blacksmith, 147

Moroccan Chieftain Receiving Tribute, 56, 88–90, 89, 171n83, 171n85

Moroccan Horsemen by the River Sebou, 130, 130–31

Moroccan Man Wearing a Haik, 47

Moroccan Military Exercises, 1, 2, 69–70, 72, 80–81, 159n48, 167n2

Moroccan Mounting His Horse, 133

Moroccan Saddle, 79

Moroccan Saddling His Horse, 133, 133

Moroccan Troops Fording a River, 124–31, 125, 136, 177n24

The Riding Lesson, 138–41, 139, 146, 178n48

Seated Figure in Turkish Costume, 35, 37, 39

Seven Sketches of Arabs, 86

Sketches from Tangier, 5

Sketches from the Trip from Meknes to Tangier, 68

Sketches from the Trip to Meknes, 127–29

Standing Moroccan from Tangier, 48, 50, 165n28

Street in Meknes, 49, 53

Studies of Arabs on Horseback, 79

Studies of Horses, 36

Studies of the Moroccan Cavalry, 78

Study of Arabs, 44

Study of Dionysus, 59, 59

Turk in a Red Cape, 35, 36

Turk Mounting His Horse, 32–33

Turk Saddling His Horse, 32–33, 34

Turk Seated on a Sofa Smoking, 30, 30, 35–36, 39, 161–62n62

Two Horses Fighting in a Stormy Landscape, 144, 146

Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 1, 3, 6, 85, 138, 154, 158n17

Young Arab Man in His Apartment, 57–60, 58

Young Tiger Playing with Its Mother, 166n58

Young Turk Stroking His Horse, 32, 33, 81

See also The Massacres of Chios; The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage

Delacroix, Henriette, 141

Delacroix, Henry, 19

Delaporte, Jacques-Denis, 80

Delaroche, Paul, 39

Dey, Hussein, 75, 175n76

dress. See clothing

Drummond Hay, Edward, 83, 144

Drummond Hay, John, 84, 170n65

Dupré, Louis, 23, 160n32

Durand-Brager, Henri, 111, 174n59

East

binary construction of West versus, 5, 6

Delacroix’s reversal of roles of West and, 21

Said on Western representations of the, 5, 97

timeless and primitive characterization of, 105

See also Orientalism

Eastern Mediterranean

European travel accounts of, 61

French imperialism in, 16

Orientalism and, 3, 6

stereotypes regarding, 9

Vernet’s trip to, 166n80

Egypt

French depictions of, 6

Mamluk massacre in (1811), 28, 29, 31

Napoleonic conquest of, 16, 28–29, 32, 40

stereotypes regarding, 9

el-Jamaï, Moukhtar, 98, 172n11

Elmore, Adam, 35, 162–63n84

equines. See horses and horsemanship

Fabre, Côme, 122, 147

Ferrer, Daniel, 172n9

Finlay, Nancy, 60

Flaubert, Gustave, 9, 60

Forbin, Auguste de, 29, 32, 81

France

Abd el-Kader’s “Smala” captured by, 112–15, 174nn64–65

absence of history in paintings of North Africa, 105

art market shifts within, 12, 122, 135

class boundaries in, 49, 87

clothing in, 9, 11, 31, 40, 45, 49

colonization of Algeria, 7, 10, 55, 105, 110–17, 119–20, 158n41, 168n31, 175n71

Delacroix on military in, 19, 135–36, 142

equestrian portrait tradition in, 98–99, 98–99, 120, 172n12, 172n15

on Greek war for independence, 16–17

invasion of Algeria (1830), 3, 4, 7, 11, 75, 78

July Monarchy, 8–9, 39, 49, 56, 73, 87, 115, 122

leadership of military in, 7

Moroccan relations with, 3, 7, 12, 74, 79, 95, 97, 105–11, 153, 158n23

Muslims as viewed by, 11, 15, 25

nationalism in, 74, 111, 153, 175n72

political culture in, 16, 56, 97

Restoration in, 8–9, 19, 39, 70, 160n19, 163n100

Revolution in, 8, 25, 60, 161n53

Turkish culture and French art, 31–36, 38–40

urbanization and industrialization of, 122, 141

warfare, approach to, 74

See also French imperialism; French masculinity

Fraser, Elisabeth, 8, 23, 160n27

French imperialism

comparison with ancient Rome, 61

in Eastern Mediterranean, 16

imagery of, 97, 110

as liberation from despotism, 92, 158n41

in North Africa, 3, 6, 9, 12, 61, 110–11, 116

French masculinity

attribution of positive traits to Moroccans, 11

dandy as model of, 9, 25, 31, 39–40, 45

dignified bearing and, 52, 60

fashionability and, 31, 40, 43

horses as symbols of, 31, 84, 162n67

military, 8–9, 19, 22, 25, 73, 92, 160n18

Napoleonic, 8, 19, 25, 70, 160n18

French Orientalism, 1, 6, 104, 153

French Revolution, 8, 25, 60, 161n53

Friedlaender, Walter, 160n14

Fromentin, Eugène, 153, 155

Galerie Lebrun (Paris), 17, 166n58

Gautier, Théophile, 55, 60, 101, 140

gender roles, 8, 140

genre paintings, 12, 19, 31, 35, 39, 137, 152, 159n48

Géricault, Théodore

Charging Chasseur of the Imperial Guard, 21, 23

Delacroix’s critique of horses depicted by, 34, 147–49

Two Dapple Gray Horses Fighting in a Stable, 147–48, 148

Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 60, 155

Girodet-Trioson, Anne-Louis

influence on Delacroix, 19, 28, 40

The Revolt of Cairo, 23, 24, 28–29

Godard, Léon, 170n65

Gotlieb, Marc, 31

Goupil-Fouquet, Frédéric, 166n80

Greece

European travel accounts of, 29

French opinions of modern Greeks, 17, 159n9

Ottoman treatment of women in, 22–23

war for independence from Ottoman Empire, 16–17, 26, 159n12

Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo, 19, 40, 42, 57, 67, 122, 158n17, 159n9

Gros, Antoine-Jean

Bacchus and Ariadne, 56, 166n58

The Battle of Aboukir, 19, 21–22, 21–23, 29, 33, 142

horses depicted by, 33, 34, 83, 142, 143, 148

influence on Delacroix, 19, 29, 33, 40, 70, 161n52

Guégan, Stéphane, 119

Guépoulain, E. de, 174n63

Guiaud, Jacques, 111, 112, 174n61

gunpowder races. See courses de poudre

Hamed, Ali ben, 117, 119, 119–20, 175n74

Hannoosh, Michèle, 10–11, 34, 123–24, 157n8, 157n11, 159nn46–47, 165n51, 166n80, 169n40, 172n10

harems

The Death of Sardanapalus and, 29, 161n56

Greek women forced to join, 22

possibility of Delacroix fabricating visits to, 157n5

stereotypes involving, 58

Western colonialist fantasy of, 1, 158n17

Women of Algiers in Their Apartment and, 158n17

Haskell, Francis, 21, 160n17

Hassan II (Moroccan sultan), 153–54, 154

Haussard, Prosper, 73, 94, 111

heroic masculinity, 1, 12, 15, 59, 69, 88, 121–22, 136, 150

history paintings

costume-based, 31, 45

decline of, 12, 122, 152

generational shift in, 38–39

horses in, 35

hybrid, 137

masculinity in, 1, 69, 121, 151

neoclassical, 34, 38

pictorial language of, 68

Turkish subjects and, 16, 26

honor, 8, 9, 19, 88

Hope, Thomas, 40

horses and horsemanship

absence of restraint, 144

affective bonds with, 32, 81

agency of, 147, 149

for Algerian resistance movement, 97

Arab, 12, 32, 80–81, 101, 162nn71–73

barb, 80–81, 83, 101, 142, 143, 146, 149, 152

breed indicators, 179n78

children’s familiarization with, 138

commodification of, 147

cultural legacy of, 140, 141

Delacroix on revitalizing effects of, 67

equestrian portrait tradition, 98–99, 98–99, 120, 172n12, 172n15

equine body in art, 15, 31, 162n81

as expression of power and nobility, 31, 162n68

intelligence and expressivity of, 24–26, 32, 80–81, 83, 143, 149

methods of instruction, 80, 169n48

Napoleonic wars and, 32, 162n70

as symbols of masculinity, 15, 31, 79–80, 84, 140, 162n67

of Turks, 11, 31–35, 33–34, 40, 41, 81, 151

in warfare, 74, 142

See also cavalry

Houssaye, Arsène, 111, 174n57

Hugo, Victor: «Les têtes du Serail,» 23

hunt paintings, 137, 137, 142, 178nn45–46

imagination

independence of, 123, 124

invented masculinity and, 136–38, 140–41

memory and, 121, 122, 128, 131, 143, 147, 150, 152

power of, 136–37

primacy of, 142, 144

realism in conflict with, 123, 141

imperialism. See French imperialism

Isabey, Eugène, 4

Islam and Muslims

Christianity in opposition to, 26

French attitudes toward, 11, 15, 25

horses, affective bonds with, 32

signifiers in The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, 101, 172n21

stereotypes regarding, 26, 93, 161n47

Turks as, 11, 15, 17, 24–26, 29, 41

women and, 114

Isly, Battle of (1844), 7, 95, 97, 105–11, 136, 152

Janissaries, 28, 31, 161n51

Jazet, Jean-Pierre-Marie, 62, 63

Jews and Judaism, 4, 49, 61

Joannides, Paul, 100

Jobert, Barthélémy, 122, 124, 159n47, 164n11

Johnson, Lee

on Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable, 179n75

on Arab Soldier by a Grave, 171n91

on The Death of Marcus Aurelius, 174n54

on Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, 91

on Géricault horse lithographs owned by Delacroix, 34

on Gros as influence on Delacroix, 161n52

on Mornay watercolors, 157n11

on Moroccan Chieftain Receiving Tribute, 90

on The Riding Lesson, 138

on The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, 97, 100, 104, 172n9

on Turk Seated on a Sofa Smoking, 35

Julien, Charles-André, 174nn64–65

Kallmyer, Nina Athanassaglou, 17, 26

Lacretelle, Charles, 25, 29–30

Lagerheim, Julius, 54, 165n51

Lamartine, Alphonse de, 81, 138

Lambert, Elie, 104, 108, 157n5

Lambertson, John, 16, 28, 29

landscape paintings, 12, 123, 141, 152

Larivière, Charles-Philippe, 111, 174n60

Larousse, Pierre, 69

leadership

of Abd el-Malek, 12, 84, 85, 87, 88, 94, 152

authoritative style of, 84, 87

dignified, 131, 152

of French military, 7

Moroccan masculinity and, 3, 8, 61, 94

Ottoman, 31

Longuet, Marie-Alexandre, 111, 174n60

Lorcin, Patricia M. E., 166n76

Louis XVIII (king of France), 29

Louis-Philippe (king of France)

authoritarianism of, 100

diplomatic mission to Morocco, 3

equestrian portraits of, 98–99, 99, 172n12, 172n15

Hall of the Crusades project, 90

imagery in The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, 100

ostrich as gift from Abd er-Rahman, 130

sons of, 73, 99, 111–13, 175n69

Vernet and, 62, 111, 113, 115, 174–75n66

MacKenzie, John, 6

Maghreb (western North Africa)

Abd er-Rahman’s influence in, 120

imagery associated with, 101–2

impact of fall of Algiers on, 75

stereotypes regarding, 9, 158n36

See also specific countries

Mahmut II (Ottoman sultan), 28

Mamluks, 28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 43, 44, 74

Manet, Édouard, 13

manliness. See masculinity

Mantz, Paul, 140

Marilhat, Prosper, 153

Marrinan, Michael, 100, 113, 174–75n66

masculinity

chivalric ideal and, 84, 87–88, 122

heroic, 1, 12, 15, 59, 69, 88, 121–22, 136, 150

in history paintings, 1, 69, 121, 151

honor and, 8, 9, 19, 88

horses as symbols of, 15, 31, 79–80, 84, 140, 162n67

invented, 136–38, 140–41

power and, 1, 12, 59

self-contained, 9, 11, 42, 49, 52, 58–60

social construction of, 8

Turkish, 11, 15–16, 19, 40, 43

See also French masculinity; military masculinity; Moroccan masculinity

Massacres of Chios, The (Delacroix)

antiheroism of Turks in, 11, 19, 22, 25–26, 41

cavalryman in, 17, 70

clothing of Turks in, 35

criticisms of, 23, 31, 160n14, 160n17, 160n31

Greek war for independence as inspiration for, 16–17

horse’s expressivity in, 24–26, 32, 149

images of, 18, 20

masculinity and, 15, 19, 22, 25–26

reversal of roles of East and West in, 21

Salon of 1845 exhibition, 17

stereotypical construct of Turks in, 15, 22–26, 29, 40

Massé, Emmanuel, 111, 174n60

memory

distance and, 123

embellishment of, 143

hybridizations produced by, 128

imagination and, 121, 122, 128, 131, 143, 147, 150, 152

of Moroccan Royal Cavalry, 136

realism and, 144, 150

reshaping of, 130, 131

time’s impact on, 124

men. See masculinity

Mercey, Frédéric de, 55

military masculinity

courage and, 9, 12, 32, 70, 74, 79, 85, 88, 92, 135–36

embrace of duty and, 8, 19

French, 8–9, 19, 22, 25, 73, 92, 160n18

Moroccan, 64–65, 74, 84

sangfroid and, 25–26

self-sacrifice and, 8, 19, 70, 92

Miller, Peter Benson, 119

Miller, Susan Gilson, 9, 152–53

Millevoye, Charles, 32

modernity, 13, 42, 68, 121–22, 135, 141

Mohammed IV (Sidi Mohammed), 107–9, 108, 111, 152, 173–74n44, 174n61

Moreau-Nélaton, Etienne, 42, 49

Morel-Fatio, Léon, 111, 174n59

Mornay, Charles de

assassination attempt against, 76, 85

on courses de poudre, 76–77

diplomatic mission to Morocco, 3, 41

equine battle experienced by, 83, 144

French uniform worn by, 48, 48

meeting with Abd er-Rahman, 104, 104

moussem procession witnessed by, 54–55

watercolors made for, 4, 54, 84, 157n11

Moroccan masculinity

classicism and, 41–44, 48–49, 51–53, 56–61, 151

dignified bearing and, 11, 48–49, 51–52, 60, 131

exposure to natural world and, 56–57, 74, 79, 137

heroic, 1, 12, 59, 69, 88, 121–22, 136, 150

horses and, 79–80, 84, 140

leadership and, 3, 8, 61, 94

military, 64–65, 74, 84

self-contained, 11, 42, 49, 52, 58–60, 64

sexuality and, 57–60

Moroccan Royal Cavalry

authority of sultan over, 98

Battle of Isly and (1844), 7, 97

Burel’s account of, 69–70, 74, 77, 168n14

courses de poudre and, 69–70, 74–80, 77, 83, 87–88, 131, 153–55, 167n11, 168nn29–30

Delacroix’s memory of, 136

French diplomatic delegation escorted by, 68, 77, 84

genre paintings of, 12, 159n48

masculinity of, 69, 74, 79–80, 84

at moussem procession, 55

paintings of individual soldiers with horses, 133–34, 133–36

power of, 74, 75

See also Abd el-Malek, Mohammed ben Abou ben

Morocco

absolutist model of governance in, 94, 100

Aïssaoua in, 52–56, 165nn42–45, 165n51

Alawite dynasty of, 105, 153

class boundaries in, 49

clothing in, 11, 42–51, 47, 50, 101–2, 158n20, 173n27

cultural legacy of horsemanship in, 140, 141

Delacroix’s conflation of Turks with Moroccans, 11, 15

family life in, 138–41, 139

French relations with, 3, 7, 12, 74, 79, 95, 97, 105–11, 153, 158n23

internal conflicts, 93, 136, 153, 171n99

invasion by Spain (1859), 152

military culture of, 64–65

military reform efforts in, 85, 170n71

moussem procession in, 52–55, 165n42, 165n45

payment for men posing for Delacroix, 44, 164n18

as protectorate of France and Spain, 153

religious diversity in, 49

Sharifian dynasty of, 105, 120

sovereignty of, 12, 98, 105, 108, 121

Spanish relations with, 152, 153

warfare, approach to, 74

women in, 3

See also Moroccan masculinity; Moroccan Royal Cavalry

Morris, Michel, 175n72

moussem (ceremonial procession), 52–55, 165n42, 165n45

Murat, Joachim, 19, 33

Muslims. See Islam and Muslims

Musset, Alfred de, 60

Napoleon Bonaparte

battle imagery of, 19, 160n19

Civil Code of, 140

Egyptian and Syrian campaigns, 16, 28–29, 32, 40

equestrian portraits of, 172n12

horses and cavalry of, 19, 21, 32, 162n70

masculinity in era of, 8, 19, 25, 70, 160n18

nationalism, 74, 111, 153, 175n72

neoclassicism, 34, 38, 56–59, 61, 64

Niati, Houria: No to Torture, 154

Nochlin, Linda, 6, 97, 104, 158n17, 175n74

North Africa

absence of history in French paintings of, 105

Delacroix’s interpretations of, 9–11, 49

Delacroix’s trip to (1832), 1, 3–4, 10–11, 41, 157n8

European travel accounts of, 61

French imperialism in, 3, 6, 9, 12, 61, 110–11, 116

imagery associated with, 101–2

Orientalism and, 3, 6

Roman conquest of, 61

stereotypes regarding, 9, 158n36

visual culture in, 154

See also Maghreb; specific countries

Nye, Robert, 8, 60

O’Brien, David, 42, 55, 68, 88, 121–22, 135, 164n10

Orientalism

Arab violence and, 67, 69, 93

artistic treatment of, 6, 104, 122

definitions of, 1, 3, 5

French, 1, 6, 104, 153

Said on, 4–6, 157nn14–15

stereotypes and, 31, 67

will to domination and, 153

Ottoman Empire

cavalrymen in, 17, 70

European travel accounts of, 15, 23, 25, 29–30, 159n3, 160n32

Greek war for independence from, 16–17, 26, 159n12

Janissaries massacre in (1826), 28, 31, 161n51

leadership practices in, 31

racial and ethnic diversity within, 28, 29, 161n51, 161n57

satellite kingdoms of, 3, 7, 10, 16, 105

See also Turks

Outram, Dorinda, 60

Paillot de Montabert, Jacques-Nicolas: Roustam Raza, Mamluk of Emperor Napoleon I, 45

parasols, 106–9, 107–9, 152, 154, 173n41, 173–74nn43–44

patriarchy, 56, 63, 140, 141

Pelletan, Eugène, 51, 165n36

Peltre, Christine, 67, 162n71

Perrot, Philippe, 45, 52

Petroz, Pierre, 140, 178n48

Phidias, figure of Dionysus by, 59

Pichot, Amédée, 159n8

pictorial devices, 17, 98, 105

Pierret, Jean-Baptiste, 46, 162n84, 163n87

Piron, Achille, 11, 123

Porterfield, Todd, 6, 42, 154, 158n17

postcolonialism, 7, 9, 158n33

Pouqueville, François-Charles de, 29, 31

power

consolidation of, 29

horses as symbol of, 31, 162n68

of imagination, 136–37

masculinity and, 1, 12, 59

of Moroccan Royal Cavalry, 74, 75

parasols as attributes of, 106, 107, 173n43

political, 98, 100–101, 104–6, 108–10, 120

Salon of 1845 and competing visions of, 111–17, 119–20

Pratt, Mary Louise, 8, 78–79

propaganda, 4, 40, 92, 152

rape. See sexual violence

Rauch, André, 70

Rautmann, Peter, 105

realism, 122–24, 141–44, 147–50, 152, 176n14, 179n83

Reddy, William, 8

Regnault, Henri, 60

religion

diversity in Morocco, 49

in public discourse on Greek war for independence, 26

as subject of paintings, 62, 167n82

See also specific religions

Révoil, Pierre-Henri: Convalescence of Chevalier Bayard, 39, 39

Roche, Daniel, 81

Rochefoucauld, Sosthène de la, 161n49

Rosenthal, Donald A., 163n88

Rossini, Gioachino, 87, 170n76

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 123, 176n12

Rubens, Peter Paul, 34, 83, 137, 142–43, 148, 178n46

Said, Edward

on feminized subalterns, 9

Orientalism, 4–6, 157nn14–15

on representations of the East by the West, 5, 97

sangfroid (composure), 25–26, 29, 49, 52, 59

Savary, Claude-Étienne, 61, 166n71

Scheffer, Ary: The Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom Receives at the Barrière du Trône the First Regiment of Hussards under the Command of the duc de Chartres, 98, 98–99, 172n13

Schoelcher, Victor, 62–63

Sébastiani, Horace, 76

self-containment, 49, 52, 58–60, 131

self-sacrifice, 8, 19, 70, 92

Sérullaz, Arlette, 179n76

Sérullaz, Maurice, 171n85

sexuality

autonomy and, 64

Moroccan masculinity and, 57–60

sexual violence, 17, 22–23, 113

Sharifian dynasty, 105, 120

Shaw, Thomas, 61–62, 166nn74–76, 166n79

Silvestre, Théophile, 67, 80, 143, 159n48, 179n70

soldiers. See military masculinity

Soutman, Pieter Claesz, 142

Spain, Moroccan relations with, 152, 153

Spivak, Gayatri, 158n33

stereotypes

of Arab violence, 67, 93

of Islam and Muslims, 26, 93, 161n47

of North Africa, 9, 158n36

of Turks, 15, 22–26, 29–31, 40, 58

subalterns, 9, 60, 79, 152, 158n33

Sue, Eugène, 81, 147

Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, The (Delacroix)

atemporality of, 105–6, 108

authority over cavalry, 98

chronology and production of, 97, 172n4

clothing in, 48, 49, 51, 101–2

criticisms of, 6, 95, 97, 101, 110–11, 174n51

dignified bearing of figures in, 49, 51–52, 60

in equestrian portrait tradition, 98

images of, 96, 102, 107

Louis-Philippe imagery in, 98–100

manipulations by Delacroix, 100, 172n9

on Moroccan sovereignty, 12, 98, 105, 108, 121

North African imagery in, 101–2

parasol in, 106–9, 107, 154, 173n41

pictorial devices used in, 98, 105

political authority as depicted in, 98–101, 104–6, 108–10, 120, 152

on postage stamp, 153–54, 154

preliminary sketches for, 100, 104, 104, 173n29

racial and ethnic elements in, 101, 173n26

Salon of 1845 exhibition, 12, 49, 94, 95, 101, 108–12, 152, 172n10, 174n63

signifiers of Islam in, 101, 172n21

size of, 95, 97–98, 172n8

state purchase of, 110, 174n54

Syria

European travel accounts of, 29

horse breeding in, 32

Napoleonic conquest of, 16

Tardieu, Alphonse, 93, 111

Thiers, Adolphe, 25, 160n31

Thomson, Ann, 161n47

Thoré, Théophile, 51, 174n62

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 175n75

torture, 17, 92

transculturation, 8, 78–79, 158n26

Trapp, Frank Anderson, 97, 121, 147, 164n11, 173n39

Turks

antiheroism of, 11, 16, 19, 22, 25–26, 31, 41

beau idéal embodied by, 61

clothing of, 11, 29, 31, 35–40, 37, 45, 102, 163nn87–88

Delacroix’s conflation of Moroccans with, 11, 15, 41

Delacroix’s representations of, 11, 15–26, 18, 20, 30, 30–31, 41, 160n17

French art and culture of, 31–36–38–40

in history paintings, 16, 26

horses and horsemanship of, 11, 31–35, 33–34, 40, 41, 81, 151

masculinity and, 11, 15–16, 19, 40, 43

as Muslims, 11, 15, 17, 24–26, 29, 41

stereotypes regarding, 15, 22–26, 29–31, 40, 58

See also Ottoman Empire

Vauvenargues, Marquis de (Luc Clapiers), 45

Vergnaud, Amand-Denis, 80

Vernet, Horace (Carle)

The Arab Tale-teller, 62, 65, 138

armée d’Afrique and, 73, 92, 114

Bonapartist ideals and, 70, 168n17

The Capture of the Smala of Abd el-Kader, 111–16, 114–18, 174n62, 174–75nn66–72

The Duc d’Orléans Proceeds to the Hôtel de Ville, 99, 99–100

Hagar Banished by Abraham, 63

imperial genre paintings of, 19, 160n19

influence on Delacroix, 29, 172n15

Joseph’s Coat, 63

Judah and Thamar, 63

Louis-Philippe and, 62, 111, 113, 115, 174–75n66

male agency in works by, 8–9

Mamluk and His Horse, 33, 34, 81

Massacre of the Mamluks, 28, 29, 31

models used by, 62, 166–67n82

Peace and War, 160n19

Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, 62–64, 63, 166n82

The Siege of Constantine, 73, 92–93

trips to Algeria, 4, 62, 157n9, 166n80

The Veteran at Home, 160n19

Verninac, Raymond de, 141

Vigarello, Georges, 52

violence

Arab, 67, 69, 93

decapitation, 23–24, 76

of French in Algeria, 6, 104

of French Revolution, 161n53

Janissaries massacre (1826), 28, 31, 161n51

Mamluk massacre (1811), 28, 29, 31

political, 113

sexual, 17, 22–23, 113

torture, 17, 92

Vitet, Louis, 31

Voutier, Olivier, 22–24, 160n27

War of Tetuan, 152

Weil, Kari, 81

Wein, Jo Ann, 49

West

binary construction of East versus, 5, 6

Delacroix’s reversal of roles of East and, 21

harem fantasy in the, 1, 158n17

Said on representations of the East by the, 5, 97

technological innovations in, 105

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 59

women

Arab, 3, 113–14

sexual violence against, 17, 22–23, 113

See also harems

Yusuf (leader of spahis), 114–15, 175n70

Zemoul tribe, 175n76