La batalla de Tetuán

In 1860 the city of Barcelona sent a young painter to a war. Spanish troops, among them a battalion of Catalan volunteers, were fighting in Morocco under General Prim, who came from Reus, the same town as the painter. Mariano Fortuny was dispatched to the front to record the Battle of Tetuán for the city, and spent about three months there filling nearly 200 drawings and watercolors. The vast canvas he began afterward, close to ten meters wide, was meant to be the grand official record. He could never resolve it, grew discouraged, abandoned it, and handed back the money Barcelona had advanced him. What survives is loose and rapid, closer to a giant sketch than a finished picture, the charging horsemen and drifting smoke barely pinned to the canvas before he set it aside.