Caccia al leone in Marocco

Delacroix painted this in 1854 from something he had seen 22 years earlier. In 1832 he had travelled to Morocco with a French diplomatic mission to the sultan, six months that overwhelmed him, the light, the horses, the clothing, and he filled notebooks he would draw on for the rest of his life. He never actually witnessed a lion hunt; he assembled this one from that store of memory and his own imagination, two hunters under a broad tree, a loose sabre on the ground telling you the fight is about to begin. The colour does the rest, red against green, blue against orange. It entered the Hermitage in 1922 from an academy collection in Saint Petersburg.