Delacroix’s trip to Morocco in 1832: a revelation
Delacroix's journey to Morocco in 1832 had a significant impact. The capture of Algiers in 1830, marking the beginning of a period of colonization, drew many artists to North Africa. Despite the French troops' difficult advance in the month of June, on the 29th the siege of the citadel defending the city finally began. Algiers surrendered on July 5th and the Dey abdicated; news of the capture reached Paris on July 9th. As a member of a diplomatic mission led by the Comte de Mornay, Eugène Delacroix wrote down and sketched his impressions in his journals. The discovery of an entirely different world offered him a rich new color palette. His stay in "Barbary," which took him from Tangiers to Meknes and then on to Algiers, provided the artist with countless unusual scenes whose strangeness, singularity, and cultural expression he sought to capture. With a keen eye, Delacroix observed the customs and traditions, the colors and the white garments of the Moroccans, far removed from the "Orientalist" paintings that he had produced until then.
In Algiers, during a visit to a house, he was deeply struck by the women he found inside. The mastery of this skilled colorist prevails over his lavish compositions. After the painting was restored, it went back on view in the museum, along with a wall text describing the circumstances behind its making: "The salon visitors were surprised by this scene without a narrative, an idealized recollection of a visit to Algiers two years earlier. Everything hinges on the colorful harmonies of the fabrics, the jewelry, and the furniture, modulated by different intensities of light, evoking a paradise both modern and timeless." In its quest for a primitive purity of sorts, which Diderot had already pursued in his writings on aesthetics, Orientalism contributed to the development of a new language in painting where color and movement ruled supreme. In the 19th century, an Orientalism made up of dreams, images, and words offered a vast repertoire from which to draw inspiration. The Orient became an essential subject for artists, a movement that we also find in writers such as Alphonse de Lamartine. Their works attest to this taste for an Oriental "elsewhere," a source of meditation and philosophical reflection.
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Summary