Jewish Wedding in Morocco

In February 1832 Delacroix travelled to Morocco with a French diplomatic mission and was invited to a Jewish wedding in Tangier. He filled notebooks with quick sketches and written notes of the courtyard, the musicians, the women in their heavy embroidered dress, and he lived off those pages for the rest of his life. He did not begin this painting until 1837 and finished it for the 1841 Salon in Paris, working from memory and those notes. The scene keeps the feel of something observed rather than staged, the crowd pressed along a gallery, the light dropping into an open court, a guest climbing the stairs at the side. North Africa had shown Delacroix a world he felt looked like the ancient one. The heir to the French throne bought the picture the year it was shown.