Delacroix, is frequently said to be the unacknowledged child of the statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand. He was born near Paris into a family of politicians. At the Lycée where he studied, he immersed himself in the Classics and won awards for drawing. In 1815 he became a pupil of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. His taste, interests, manner of work and style came to epitomise the Romantic movement. Highly prolific, he was also intensely introspective and his long journal exists as fascinating insight into his character and opinions. He did not remain long in Guérin’s academic studio but chose to follow the vein of work developed by more experimental artists such as Goya and Géricault. After this, largely self-directed, he passed his days in the Louvre, copying the works of Rubens and Titian. His first entries to the Paris Salon were the The Barque of Dante and the Massacre at Chios both of which were bought by the French State, although the artist Baron Gros had referred to the latter as ‘the death of Painting’. Talleyrand is said to have been involved in the purchases. Delacroix had met Richard Parkes Bonnington whilst studying in the Louvre, and is reported to have learnt the art of watercolour from him. Perhaps inspired by this friendship, he visited England in 1825 and encountered in greater depth the paintings of John Constable whose Haywain he had greatly admired at the Salon on 1824. Further masterpieces followed this journey, the Death of Sardanapalus, of 1827, inspired by Byron’s play, and the iconic Liberty Guiding the People of 1831, which again was bought by the French State but then hidden from view. In 1832, he accompanied a French delegation to North Africa, a journey which fired his imagination and fed into his art over the following decades through the extraordinary legacy of sketches and studies he produced with such fervour during his travels. In 1833 he began work on a series of murals for the King’s Chamber in the Palais Bourbon. Delacroix continued receiving commissions of this official nature despite the deterioration of his health. His large-scale decorative schemes show a magnificent richness of colour and fertility of design, surely partly inspired by the work of his artistic heroes Rubens and Titian, and the three religious works executed towards the end of his life in the Chapelle des Anges of St. Sulpice (1853-61) inspired Baudelaire, who described Delacroix as a ‘poet in painting’ to call him the only artist ‘in our faithless generation who conceived religious pictures’.  In the later years, Delacroix spent considerable time in his small house in the country and was cared for devotedly by his housekeeper. Following his death, the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (which he had helped to found in 1862) organised a retrospective exhibition of nearly 250 of his works. The following year, the contents of his studio were offered at auction in the huge sale mentioned above under the Provenance. His studio in Paris is now a museum devoted to his life and work.

This statuesque figure was drawn by Delacroix soon after his first arrival in Tangier in 1832. The model is easily recognisable again in a study now in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm dated, 16 February, which shows the same man seated1 and in two small studies of his head as in that drawing, both in the Louvre (RF 9587 and 9588). Delacroix travelled to Morocco in the winter of 1832 as official artist to the French diplomatic mission visiting the Sultan. In 1830, the French had occupied neighbouring Algeria and were keen to reassure Moulay Abd er Rahman of their friendly intentions towards his country. Encountering the Arab world with passionate and vivid interest, Delacroix felt, at the same time, the region’s direct contact with Antiquity. In the present study, the artist discerns the inherent nobility of the Moroccan’s stance, giving a classical perfection to his upright bearing. As in the drawing of the same figure seated on a chair, Delacroix combined red and black chalk, a technique he appears to have reserved for his Moroccan sketchbooks, adding a clear blue watercolour to highlight the figure’s tunic and a deep red for his belt.  Many of Delacroix’s Moroccan drawings focus on details of costume and include annotations about colours and materials but here, with the line of his chalk, the artist seems to be revelling in the elegant proportions of the figure and his elongated profile.

Maurice Arama, curator of the 1994-5 exhibition Delacroix au Maroc2, has kindly commented on this drawing, which he first encountered at the 1963 Louvre exhibition. Noting the large size of the sheet and the various mediums Delacroix has used, M. Arama imagines the painter comfortably installed in one of the Consulate buildings, with the model before him, holding his pose for a considerable time. From his intricate knowledge of the artist’s journal, M. Arama recalls a figure called Caddour, in the pay of the French at Tangier. His name is not recorded on any of the known drawings surviving from the period but Caddour certainly posed for Delacroix; he suffered from the artist’s cigar smoke during the period of Ramadan and is also known to have lent a fine horse to the Ambassador, the Comte de Mornay, with whom Delacroix travelled to the Sultan’s palace at Meknes. Certain identification of the model depends upon the emergence of an inscribed drawing but the likelihood is strong that the proud figure seen here is the aforementioned Caddour. M. Arama has pointed out a third depiction of the man, again in the Louvre, dated the 17th January which means it was done almost immediately upon Delacroix’s arrival; it shows this tall man seated on the ground, one leg drawn up towards his chin, shrouded in his djellabah3.

Apart from specific, individual sheets such as the present one, Delacroix is said to have filled eight notebooks with his Moroccan sketches, four of which survive; three in the Musée du Louvre and the fourth in the Musée Condé at Chantilly. The artist also wrote countless letters to his friends in Paris, describing the intense sunlight, the white houses, blissful, shaded gardens, and above all the exotic figures he encountered4. With such ingredients, Delacroix was able to feed upon his Moroccan memories for the rest of his career.

1. See exhibition catalogue, loc.cit., Literature, cat.1.

2. Email correspondence: 12 and 13 December 2010. Author of Delacroix, un voyage initiatique: Maroc, Andalousie, Algerie, Paris 2006.

3. Louvre (RF 3718), black chalk and wash, 307 x 200mm. (Robaut, no.473)

4. See exhibition catalogue, op. cit., 1994-5, p.56.