Arabs Skirmishing in the Mountains

Delacroix signed and dated this canvas in 1863, and on 12 April that year he sold it to the Paris dealers Tedesco Frères. He was ill through that spring and died in August, so it comes from his last months of work. The country in it he had seen exactly once, 31 years earlier, when he crossed to Morocco in 1832 with a French diplomatic mission sent to the sultan. He filled notebooks there with harnesses, cloaks, hilltop walls and the hard southern light, and he never went back. The fight itself never happened. He built the riders, the rearing horses and the fortified ridge out of those old sketchbooks in his Paris studio, which is what he had been doing with the Moroccan material for three decades.