Caballos árabes luchando en un establo

In 1832 Eugene Delacroix travelled through Morocco with a French diplomatic mission, and one day he watched two stallions tear into each other in a fury he never forgot. He wrote about it to a friend at the time. Nearly 30 years later, an old man now, he finally painted it, finishing this canvas in June 1860. Two horses rear and bite in a shadowy stable, one throwing its rider, dust and violence packed into a small frame. The fight he had seen actually happened out in the open, but he shut it inside four walls to concentrate all that energy. Delacroix built much of his late work out of the months he had spent in North Africa decades before, going back again and again to things he had seen only once.