Moroccan caid visiting his tribe

Delacroix spent only about six months in North Africa, in 1832, attached to a French diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Morocco. He filled notebooks and carried the images home for the rest of his life. This canvas, painted five years later in 1837, reconstructs a scene he had watched near Ksar el-Kebir: a local chief, a caid, being met and offered hospitality by people out in open country. Nothing here was sketched on the spot; it is assembled from memory and the drawings he made on that trip. It was shown at the Paris Salon of 1838, and the museum in Nantes bought it the year after.