Arab Horseman Giving a Signal

Delacroix signed and dated this small canvas in 1851, the year he finished a major public commission in Paris, the central ceiling of the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre, with Apollo slaying the serpent Python. Alongside that, he was still painting riders from a country he had seen for barely six months, 19 years earlier, on a French diplomatic mission to Morocco. Here a scout in a red cloak checks his horse in mid-gallop and throws up an arm, and far behind him his companions are coming down a narrow mountain path. Pictures like this found buyers easily. Between 1860 and 1862, while Delacroix was still alive, this one went through three separate Paris sales, and in 1872 it came up again at the Hôtel Drouot.