Arabs on Horseback

France invaded Algeria in 1830, and for a generation afterwards European painters could not get enough of North African horsemen. Delacroix crossed to Morocco in 1832, and Horace Vernet built much of his career on Algerian battle scenes. This little skirmish of Arab riders belongs to that appetite. The museum dates it to about 1850, though other catalogues put it a decade earlier, and the signature AZEGLIO sits in the lower left corner.

It is a small thing, 29 by 42 centimetres, the size of a sheet of paper and a half. Even what it is painted on is unsettled. The Italian state catalogue records a wooden panel, while the Web Gallery of Art describes a metal plate, which was an ordinary choice for cabinet pictures wanting a hard, enamel-smooth surface. It hangs in the modern gallery on the second floor of Palazzo Pitti, a floor above the Palatina and on the same ticket.