(2 of 4)
The vogue for Orientalism began with Napoleon, who had a knack for creating fashion out of his bloodiest conquests. The French occupation of Egypt in 1798 produced a rash of armchairs decorated with ormolu sphinxes, tables on pyramidal bases and paintings by Baron Jean-Antoine Gros. These canvases were exuberant depictions of Napoleon's exploits, based on detailed accounts by eyewitnesses. But, as in most propagandists art, the eyewitnesses turned out to be conveniently blind. For example, the celebrated The Pesthouse at Jaffa (one of three Gros works included in the Washington exhibition) purported to document Napoleon's visit in 1799 to French soldiers struck down by the plague in Egypt. Bonaparte is portrayed as the picture of compassion, braving infection as he reaches out, Christlike, to touch one of his stricken men. In reality, as one person later reported, Napoleon was seen "lightly kicking the infected men with the sole of his boot."
Towering over Gros's minor historical curiosities, the show's eight canvases by Delacroix stand out as supreme achievements of 19th century Orientalism. Combat Between the Giaour and the Pasha was inspired by Byron's 1813 poem The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale, wherein a Venetian warrior (the giaour, or infidel in Turkish) steals a pasha's favorite concubine. So enamored was Delacroix of this saga of passion that he depicted its violent conclusion six times. In the Combat version, the giaour and the pasha do battle astride black Arabian horses, brandishing Turkish weapons that Delacroix had sketched from originals belonging to a French collector.
Yearning for the real Orient, Delacroix complained of life in Paris in his journals: "Is it living to vegetate like a fungus on a rotten trunk? ... What can Egypt be like? Everyone is mad for it. Please God! The Salon will soon bring in enough to allow me to start on my travels." Delacroix's wish was finally granted in 1832, when he was invited to join a French diplomatic mission that was negotiating with the Sultan of Morocco. During his six-month trip he kept seven notebooks of pen-and-watercolor sketches and written notes that together constitute one of the marvels of French art history.
Many of Delacroix's jottings concern the heroic Arabian steeds he loved to paint. He once sketched a battle between two stallions deep in the Moroccan hinterland. "They stood up and fought with a fierceness that made me tremble, but it was really admirable for a painting," he noted. For the next 30 years the artist would draw upon these and myriad other observations in his notebooks for his great Orientalist canvases, including his last, The Collection of Arab Taxes. Painted in 1863, the year of the artist's death at the age of 65, the picture is curiously emblematic. It shows a stallion fallen in the midst of an assault on a mysterious castle that shimmers like a mirage on the horizon.