Eugène Delacroix French, 1798 - 1863

Galerie Georges Petit, Paris
Georges Bernheim, Paris (1927)
Max Silberberg, Breslau, by 1930 (acquired from the above)
Knoedler, London

Düsseldorf, Austellung von Meisterwetrken deutscher und französischer Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts, 1930, no. 24
Munich, Ludwigs Galerie, Romantische Malerei in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1931, no. 25 (illustrated in the catalogue)
Rotterdam, Boymans Museum, Schilderijen van Delacroix tot Cézanne en Vincent van Gogh, 1933-34, no. 25
Berne, Kunsthalle, Französische Meister des 19. Jahrhunderts und van Gogh, 1934, no. 42

Raymond Escholier, Delacroix, peintre, graveur, écrivain, Paris, 1926-29, vol. II, illustrated opposite p. 80
P. Abramowski, 'Die Sammlung Silberberg, Breslau', Der Sammler, XX, no. 6, 15 March 1930, p. 150, pl. I, illustrated
Karl Scheffler, 'Die Sammlung Max Siberberg', Kunst und Künstler, XXX, 1931, p. 4; p. 5, illustrated
André Joubin, ed., Journal de Eugène Delacroix, Paris, 1950 ed. (1st ed. 1932), vol. II, p. 204, no. 3 and correction vol. III, p. 531
Maurice Sérullaz, ed., Inventaire général des dessins. Ecole française. Dessins d'Eugène Delacroix, Paris, 1984, vol. II, p. 139 (mentioned under the preparatory watercolour)
Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix. A Critical Catalogue, Oxford, 1986, vol. III, pp. 199-200, no. 394, catalogued; vol. IV, pl. 199, illustrated
Lee Johnson, 'Les dernières oeuvres: continuités et variations', in Delacroix, les dernières années, exh. cat. Grand Palais, Paris, 1998, p. 31, discussed  
Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix. A Critical Catalogue. Fourth Supplement and Reprint of Third Supplement, Oxford, 2002, pp. 13 & 14, catalogued (with additional provenance, exhibition, and literature references); pl. 13, illustrated in colour;  illustrated in colour on the dust jacket

On 22 June 1854 Delacroix noted in his Journal (A. Joubin, ed., Journal de Eugène Delacroix, Plon, Paris, 1950 ed. [1st ed. 1932], vol II, p. 204) that he had finished a picture, Femmes à la fontaine. He was presumably referring to the present work, which represents a masterful synthesis of his first-hand experience of North Africa and his own poetic imagination. Not seen on the art market for more than seventy years, the painting ranks among the finest Moorish works by the artist still in private hands.

The motif of two women at a fountain with a Moorish arch derives from a fine watercolour study that was probably done in the course of Delacroix's one and only journey to North Africa in 1832 (repr. Escholier II, p. 81; fig. 1). As Lee Johnson points out, a 'Fontaine dans une rue à Alger' contained in an undated list of works (Journal vol. III, p. 439 - Supp.) may refer to the present work or to the watercolour, thus locating the scene in Algiers, where Delacroix spent three days at the end of the trip.

Delacroix was already an established artist, with Salon successes to show for it, when, at the age of thirty, he was invited to join a diplomatic delegation to Morocco led by Charles de Mornay, who had been summoned by the king, Louis-Philippe, to appear before the Sultan of Morocco, Moulay Abd er-Rahman. The journey,  taking in Tangiers, Meknes, Oran, and Algiers, lasted six months, from January to July 1832. Delacroix, who was not directly involved in the negotiations, took full advantage of his freedom, hungrily recording his impressions as drawings and sketches, often with painstaking precision, for fear of not remembering every detail after returning home. 

The North African journey proved thrilling to Delacroix and heralded a whole new departure in his work. First and foremost Morocco would provide an endless array of subjects that would dominate his work for the rest of his career.  'The picturesque is here in abundance. At every step one sees ready-made pictures, which would bring fame and fortune to twenty generations of painters,' he wrote in a letter to Armand Bertin written from Meknes on 2 April 1832 (Jean Stewart, ed. and trans., Eugène Delacroix. Selected Letters 1813-1863, New York, 1971, p. 192, translated from A. Joubin, ed., Correspondence générale d'Eugène Delacroix, Plon, Paris, 1935-38). Between 1834 and 1859 he showed some 14 North African subjects at the Paris Salon, beginning with Les Femmes d'Alger in 1834 (fig. 2).

As the first European artist to penetrate North African culture, Delacroix introduced a whole new iconography to western art, encompassing the region's architecture, landscapes and costumes, but also the mores of the Moroccan people. 'If you knew how peacefully men live here under the scimitar of tyrants; above all, how little they are concerned about all the vanities that fret our minds! Fame, here, is a meaningless word; everything inclines one to delightful indolence; nothing suggests that this is not the most desirable state in the world. Beauty lies everywhere about one.' So wrote Delacroix in a letter to August Jal from Tangiers, on 4 June 1832 (Stewart, p. 193).

Femmes à la fontaine epitomises this mood of 'indolent' calm,  showing two young women by a street fountain below a Moorish arch filling their water jugs. They are posed, the young mother in contraposto, her companion with her arms stretched out,  but quite unselfconsciously going about their business. The little boy plays with a dog offering him a stick. In the street behind, a rider converses with a man, while another figure, perhaps a hawker selling his wares, squats on the pavement looking on. Peace and tranquility prevail. Femmes à la fontaine is typical of the incidental scenes drawn from everyday life that captured Delacroix's imagination and which found expression in many of his best Moroccan canvases (fig. 3).  

Another lesson drawn from Delacroix's experiences in North Africa was his discovery of the unique light and colours of the south. 'Come to Barbary,' he wrote to Villot on 29 February, 'you will experience the exquisite and extraordinary influence of the sun, which gives penetrating life to everything.' (Stewart, p. 186). In particular, Delacroix became fascinated by the relationships between light and colour, and between light and shadow, which seemed more marked than in the north. Femmes à la fontaine is suffused with a subdued evening light, the sun's lateral rays bathing the tops of the ochre houses in bright light, making the warm shadows in the street below all the more palpable. The sumptuous North African colours that so inspired Delacroix find expression in the young mother's coral blouse and in the golden glint of her earring, broach, and wrist bangle. 

Paradoxically, underlying Femmes à la fontaine's humble subject and warm colours is a quintessentially classical composition. Notwithstanding their North African costumes, the two girls cut  striking classical poses and have the supple monumentality of Greek beauties, borrowed from the Venetian Renaissance. And this is key to perhaps the most important legacy of the North Africa trip: it allowed Delacroix to synthesise classical tradition, the basis of his artistic training, with a new-found exoticism that so touched his romantic temperament. Unlike David or Corot, Delacroix never went to Rome to complete his education; for him the Africa trip was as formative as Rome was for them.

Delacroix's debt to Renaissance prototypes is unmistakeable. The preparatory watercolour study is particularly Raphaelesque and seems to have been influenced by the water carriers in the Fire in the Borgo (fig. 4). That influence clearly comes across in the lyrical forms of the two figures in the finished painting. But unlike the Pompier artists like David and Ingres, Delacroix considered academic classicism cold and aloof, divorced from life and real emotion. The first to admire the Greek and Renaissance masters for their ability to convey the human form, he sought to bring sculptural beauty alive, and the natural grace he perceived in the Moroccans provided the perfect vehicle. Investing his own figures with a more 'authentic' classicism became a central and recurring theme in his correspondence during the North African journey. To Jal he wrote on 4 June 1832:

'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; their marbles tell the exact truth, but one has to know how to interpret them, and they are mere hieroglyphs to our wretched modern artists. If painting schools persist in setting Priam's family and the Atrides as subjects to the nurslings of the Muses, 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 from spending any more time wearing out the classic soil of Rome.' (Stewart, pp. 193-4).

Femmes à la fontaine exemplifies this harmonious synthesis between, on the one hand, the best traditions of French and Italian Renaissance classicism and, on the other, a mastery of colour and atmosphere central to Romanticism. Delacroix gives expression to an unassuming, intimate scene from everyday life in a North African town through a remarkable clarity of conception, the majestic figures framed by a grand architectural arch in true classical tradition.  

It is again paradoxical, given Delacroix's close affinity with the Orient, that as his career progressed, he placed less and less importance on factual accuracy, and ever greater emphasis on his idea that 'Le Beau est le Vrai idéalisé'. Femmes à la fontaine, painted over twenty years after his return from Morocco, may evoke the atmosphere of the place, but much of the painstaking detail he recorded in his drawings is now absent. More important for Delacroix was the creation of an aesthetic vision. Increasingly, he eshewed in the work of later Orientalist painters the very verisimilitude to which he himself had attached so much importance during his journey. 

By the time he painted the present work, Delacroix let his imagination take the lead, even declaring: 'I began to make something tolerable of my African journey only when I had forgotten the trivial details and remembered nothing but the striking and poetic side of the subject. Up to that time, I had been haunted by this passion for accuracy that most people mistake for truth,' Delacroix wrote in his Journal on 17 October 1853 (Hubert Wellington, ed., Lucy Norton, trans., The Journal of Eugène Delacroix: A Selection, London, 1951, p. 198).

Delacroix heralded something radically new in his Moroccan canvases. Feeding his romantic temperament, his experiences in Morocco led to a whole new form of expression. Colour and light were seen in new ways, the classical figure re-invented. Among the younger generation of Orientalist painters to fall under Delacroix's influence was Theodore Chasseriau (fig. 5), who broke away from the academic edicts prescribed by his close friend and mentor, the diehard classicist Ingres, to follow the new freer style - one which would ultimately pave the way for the New Painters and even the Impressionists.

This work is sold in co-operation with the heir of Max Silberberg.