Eugène Delacroix

Artist's posthumous sale, Hôtel Drouot, February 17-29, 1864, lot 71
Knowles (acquired at the above sale)
M. Detrimont, Paris
Delagarde (acquired at the above sale in February 1889)
Kraushaar Galleries, New York (by 1944-47)
John F. Kraushaar (and sold: his sale; Parke Bernet, New York, April 9-10, 1947, lot 149)
Mr. and Mrs. Otto Spaeth, New York (by 1952)
Sale: Sotheby's, London, April 24, 1963, lot 43
Eugene Thaw, New York, 1963
Private Collection, New York, 1996
Stair Sainty Matthiesen Inc., New York

New York, Wildenstein Gallery, Eugène Delacroix, October 18-November 19, 1944, no. 8
Utica, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Spaeth Collection: Paintings and Sculpture, October 1952, no. 11
Princeton University Art Gallery, The Spaeth Collection, November 1952, no. 11

Alfred Robaut, L'Oeuvre complète de Eugène Delacroix: peintures, dessins, gravures, lithographies, supplément, Paris, 1885, p. 465, no. 1884 (as Chef marocain)
Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, Oxford, 1986, vol. III, p. 174, no. 363, pl. 179, illustrated

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This picture appears to have been painted on paper which was subsequently mounted onto linen and stretched. The paint layer has been cleaned, varnished and retouched. The retouches are clearly visible mainly in the sky in small dots addressing abrasion. The figures in the landscape show almost no retouches except in the left hand of the main figure and a few dots in his forehead. There is a slightly raised section in the sky above the standing figure's head which should be corrected and a second slightly raised section in the landscape directly to the left of the same figure's knees. However, the picture looks well and with these small corrections, will be ready to hang.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

As the undisputed leader of the Romantic movement and one of the founding members of Orientalism, Eugène Delacroix holds a special place in the history of the genre.  His trip to North Africa in 1832 may be considered the most famous - and certainly the most formative - of all nineteenth-century adventures. 

Delacroix's journey happened almost by accident - the artist was the late replacement for the painter M. E. Isabey in the suite of the Comte de Mornay, official envoy to the Sultan of Morocco.  The trip lasted only six months, but its impact on the artist was profound.  Hundreds of drawings and watercolors, as well as notebooks, letters, and the artist's Journal, form an unprecedented and incomparable archive, which Delacroix would continue to draw from throughout his career.  Despite this library of first-hand visual and textual information, however, Delacroix's goal was never one of straight transcription: His subsequent paintings are impassioned, emotive expressions of a very personal Orient - one in which the Antique was alive and well.  (As Delacroix himself wrote of North Africa, "Rome is no longer in Rome.")  It may be no accident, then, that the posture of this "Moroccan Chieftain" recalls the Apollo Belvedere (fig. 1). 

The figure of the chieftain was a favorite of Delacroix's and, if the number of works of this kind can act as a gauge, a favorite of his patrons as well.  There is a watercolor composition similar to the work presented here, signed and dated 1834 (anonymous sale, Paris, Drouot, June 2 1950, lot 2) and another watercolor variant in the Thaw collection at the Morgan Library in New York, with only minor changes in the topography, landscape, and costume of the background figure (fig. 2).  An oil painting, entitled Arab Chieftain by the Sea (sale: Christie's, New York, February 11, 1997, lot 4), signed and dated 1838, is also remarkably similar in scale and composition (fig. 2).  Delacroix's admiration for his robed Arab subjects is made clear in the artist's Journals: as he wrote, they "are closer to nature in a thousand ways; their dress, the form of their shoes . . . As for us, in . . . our ridiculous pinching clothes, we are pitiful."

Painted several years after his return from Morocco and Algeria, this oil painting owes at least as much to imagination and memory as it does to fact. The striking profile of the figure in the background, for example, is likely drawn from one of the many pages of sketches in Delacroix's notebooks, while the wild aloes and golden sands surrounding him only evoke the deserts of North Africa.  Here, as well as in the fluid painting of the chieftain's costume, Delacroix's Romantic temperament and skill as a colorist are well demonstrated. Rather than an ethnographic study of costume - which Delacroix's sketchbooks also contain - this is a pure and virtuoso demonstration of the artist's painterly technique, and an example of Delacroix's delight in revealing the kaleidoscope of colors that exist in creams, browns, and whites. (The influence of Delacroix's idiosyncratic style should not be underestimated: no less an artist than Cézanne once wrote: "When I talk about joy in color for color's sake, well, [Delacroix's work] is what I mean . . . I don't know, they enter you through the eye like a glass of wine through the throat, and suddenly you're drunk" quoted in Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne, Paris, 1926, pp 178-80.)

This unassuming work, then, may be considered the opposite of the exotic excesses of artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme, and the realization of a very different Orientalist dream. As the great painter Eugène Fromentin astutely penned: "People wanted him [Delacroix] to be more true, more naïve, perhaps they wanted him to be more Oriental . . . rest assured, however, that the most beautiful elements in his work are the most generalized ones" ('Une année dans le Sahel', in Ouevres complètes, Paris, 1984, p. 326).