Il turco in sella

In 1832 the French government sent Count Charles de Mornay to the Sultan of Morocco, hoping to keep him out of the war France had begun in Algeria two years earlier. Delacroix went along as the mission's artist and spent about six months in Morocco and Algiers. He came home with notebooks of drawings and a trunk of clothes, weapons and horse harness, and for the next 30 years he painted North Africa in a Paris studio out of those objects. This small canvas comes from the second half of the 1830s, long after the journey: a man in Eastern dress with saddlery beside him, on a support barely 40 centimetres high. Etienne Moreau-Nelaton gave it to the Louvre in 1906 on the condition that it never be lent out.