TIGER HUNT An enormously influential event in Delacroix’s
life that affected his art in both subject and form was his visit to
North Africa in 1832 (see “Delacroix in Morocco,” above). Things he
saw there shocked his imagination with fresh impressions that lasted
throughout his life and resulted in paintings such as Tiger Hunt(FIG.
30-19), which he completed more than two decades after his trip.Delacroix’s African experience also further heightened his already
considerable awareness of the expressive power of color and light.
What Delacroix knew about color he passed on to later painters of
the 19th century, particularly the Impressionists (see Chapter 31).
He observed that pure colors are as rare in nature as lines and that
color appears only in an infinitely varied scale of different tones,792 Chapter 30 EUROPE AND AMERICA, 1800 TO 1870R
omantic painters often depicted exotic faraway places they had
never seen, but Eugène Delacroix journeyed to Morocco in
1832 and discovered in the sun-drenched landscape—and in the
hardy and colorful Moroccans dressed in robes reminiscent of the
Roman toga—new insights into a culture built on proud virtues. He
found there a culture more classical than anything European Neo-
classicism could conceive. In a letter to his friend Fréderic Villot
dated February 29, 1832, he wrote:This place is made for painters....[B]eauty abounds here; not the
over-praised beauty of fashionable paintings. The heroes of David
and Co. with their rose-pink limbs would cut a sorry figure beside
these children of the sun, who moreover wear the dress of classical
antiquity with a nobler air, I dare assert.*In a second letter, written June 4, 1832, he reported to Auguste Jal:You have seen Algiers and you can imagine what the natives of
these regions are like. Here there is something even simpler and
more primitive; there is less of the Turkish alloy; I have Romans
and Greeks on my doorstep: it
makes me laugh heartily at
David’s Greeks, apart, of course,
from his sublime skill as a painter.
I know now what they were really
like;...Ifpainting schools persist
in [depicting classical subjects], I
am convinced, and you will agree
with me, that they would gain far
more from being shipped off as
cabin boys on the first boat bound
for the Barbary coast than fromspending any more time wearing out the classical soil of Rome.
Rome is no longer to be found in Rome.†The gallantry, valor, and fierce love of liberty of the Moroccans
made them, in Delacroix’s eyes, unspoiled heroes uncontaminated
by European decadence. The Moroccan journey renewed Delacroix’s
Romantic conviction that beauty exists in the fierceness of nature,
natural processes, and natural beings, especially animals. After
Morocco, more and more of Delacroix’s subjects involved combats
between beasts and between beasts and men. He painted snarling
tangles of lions and tigers, battles between horses, and clashes of
Muslims with great cats in swirling hunting scenes using composi-
tions reminiscent of those of Rubens (FIG. I-13), as in his 1854 paint-
ing Tiger Hunt (FIG. 30-19), which clearly speaks to the Romantic in-
terest in faraway lands and exotic cultures.* Translated by Jean Stewart, in Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger,
eds.,Art in Theory 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas(Oxford: Blackwell,
1998), 87.
†Ibid., 88.Delacroix in Morocco
ARTISTS ON ART30-19Eugène Delacroix,Tiger
Hunt,1854. Oil on canvas, 2 5 3 .
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Tiger Huntreflects Delacroix’s 1832
trip to Morocco, which had a lasting
impact on his art. His paintings of men
battling ferocious beasts are consis-
tent with the Romantic interest in
exotic places.1 ft.30-19A
DELACROIX,
Women of
Algiers, 1834.