01 Work, The Art of War, Eugène Delacroix's Exercices militaires des marocains/ Moroccan Military Exercises, with footnotes

Eugène Delacroix  (1798–1863)

Exercices militaires des marocains/ Moroccan Military Exercises, c. 1847

Oil on canvas

height: 53 cm (20.8 in); width: 73 cm (28.7 in) 

Fabre museum

In 1832, Delacroix spent almost six months in North Africa, mainly in Morocco, as well as in Algeria and Andalusia. From this trip during which he accompanied a French diplomatic delegation

Delacroix brought back numerous drawings and watercolors from his trip to Morocco which inspired this masterpiece created very shortly after his return. The fantasia are both martial and ritual exercises where the riders, launched at dizzying speed, demonstrate their skill in shooting rifles.

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.

As a painter and muralist, Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish author Walter Scott and the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic. Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime", of nature in often violent action.

However, Delacroix was given to neither sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible." More on Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix

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