Moroccan Man

In January 1860 the provincial council of Barcelona sent Fortuny to Morocco as its war artist, to bring back material for a set of pictures about the Spanish campaign. He reached Tetouan in February and worked there for about two months, filling sheets with soldiers, horses, streets and faces. The big battle paintings took him years and gave him trouble. The sheets kept their hold on him. This one he made in Rome nine years later, and signed and dated it at the lower right, Fortuny, Rome 1869. It is watercolour on paper rather than a painting, 32 by 20 centimetres, a man standing barefoot against a sunlit wall in a striped cloak with a white cloth over his head. Above the head you can still see pencil lines from a first attempt at the figure upright, before Fortuny tilted it to the right. The sheet came to the museum in 1904 with the bequest of Ramón de Errazu.