Arabs playing chess

Delacroix worked on this in July 1847, at a small house he'd taken at Champrosay, in the woods south of Paris, about as far from North Africa as you can get. He had actually been to Morocco, once, back in 1832, on a diplomatic mission, and the trip stayed with him for the rest of his life. By 1847 he was painting it from memory and old notebooks, and he thought the distance helped. Chasing exact accuracy, he wrote, ended up feeling untrue, and from years away he could reach for the poetry of it instead. So two men sit in the shade of a tree, bent over a chessboard, a woman standing to the left with a heavy earthenware jug on her shoulder. His Morocco journal is full of little notes about men absorbed in a game of draughts.