Delacroix’s Moroccans: Art and Masculinity

The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment is arguably Eugène Delacroix’s best-known work from his trip to Morocco in 1832, and the attention scholars have paid to it has obscured a crucial fact about Delacroix’s Moroccan subjects: most of his paintings of North Africa depict men rather than women. After serving as a diplomat’s companion on a mission to Morocco, Delacroix went on to devote over three-quarters of his massive North African oeuvre to the military prowess, effective leadership, equestrian virtuosity, and elegant dress of Moroccan men. Using the evidence of his writings, sketches, and paintings, Olmsted argues that rather than embodying a typical colonialist fantasy, Delacroix’s paintings of Moroccan men instead show his subjects as models of heroic masculinity and political sovereignty, a position that ran counter to prevailing French attitudes toward North Africans.

In this way, Delacroix’s Moroccans intervenes in the discourse of imperialism to examine the multiple, heterogeneous features of cultural response and provides nuanced readings of the artist’s work that support the idea that European constructions of non-European cultures were not monolithic. Olmsted’s multifaceted analysis creates a powerful and original understanding of Delacroix’s Moroccan oeuvre and a counternarrative to the colonialist imagery of his era. Through close attention to Delacroix’s paintings, drawings, and writings, as well as their historical and political contexts, this book illuminates the artist’s practice and offers a fresh avenue for assessing colonialism and art produced within colonial contexts.