아랍 야영지

In the spring of 1839 the Salon jury in Paris went through Delacroix's submissions and threw out three of them: a Tasso in the madhouse, an Arab soldier beside a tomb, and this camp of Arab muleteers. Critics who had been allowed a look cursed the jury for its caution. The same state whose jury refused the pictures had him at that moment painting the library ceilings of the Palais Bourbon, where the Chamber of Deputies sat. The subject came out of a journey made seven years earlier. In 1832 Delacroix travelled in the suite of the Comte de Mornay, sent by the French king as envoy to the sultan of Morocco, and filled notebooks with sketches and colour notes that he went on mining for the rest of his life. The painting is a small one, 38 by 46 centimetres, and holds a tent, a mule and the man driving it.