01 Painting by Orientalist Artists, The Art of War, Eugène Delacroix's Collision of the Moorish Horsemen, with footnotes #98

Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798-1863)

Collision of the Moorish Horsemen, c. 1843-1844

Oil on canvas

H: 32 x W: 39 in. (81.3 x 99.1 cm)

The Walters Art Museum

"During their military exercises, which consist of riding their horses at full-speed and stopping them suddenly after firing a shot, it often happens that the horses carry away their riders and fight each other when they collide." 

Delacroix uses fluid brush work to capture the color and movement of an Arab Fantasia, or ceremonial cavalry charge, mimicking battle, which he witnessed at the court of Sultan Abd-er-Rahmen of Morocco (1778-1859). More on this painting

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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