Die Konvulsionäre von Tanger

Delacroix painted this in Paris in 1837, but the scene had been in his head for five years. In 1832 he had travelled to Morocco with a French diplomatic mission, and one day in Tangier he and a companion watched from a hidden upper window as members of the Aissawa, a Sufi brotherhood, moved through the streets in a trance, some wounding themselves in the fervour of their devotion. He filled notebooks and made watercolours, then let the memory settle. Back in the studio he built it into this surging crowd, all torsion and dust, the North African light he had chased now reworked from recollection. For the rest of his life Morocco fed his imagination, decades after the few months he actually spent there had ended.