Arab Chiefs Challenging Each Other to Single Combat under the Ramparts of a City

The Salon of 1852 opened in Paris a few months after Louis-Napoléon's coup d'état, and this canvas got a rough reception there. Critics called Chassériau a pasticheur, a copier, and pointed to Delacroix's Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, painted 26 years earlier. The poet and critic Théophile Gautier thought it more a sketch than a finished picture. Two chiefs square up for a duel to the death. One, dressed in white, rides a dappled grey on dry ground. The other sits a brown horse in the water, in a red tunic and dark cloak, his spear raised. Between them a fallen man lies with a dagger still planted in his chest, and behind them the fighting goes on. Three years later the painting was shown again at the Exposition Universelle of 1855, and this time Gautier praised its fine style and its exact local colour.