Artist Portfolio: Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863)

Eugène Delacroix Moroccan Notebook 1832
Brown pen and ink with watercolour H 10.5 cm; W 9.8cm

Delacroix had this notebook with him when he landed at Tangiers in 1832, with a mission led by the Comte de Mornay and sent by the king, Louis-Philippe, to the sultan of Morocco, Moulay Abd-er-Rahman. Four of the seven notebooks that he filled during this visit to North Africa, which lasted six months, have been preserved, and three are in the Louvre. Two contain a very personal mix of sketches and notes forming the unique "journal" of a travelling painter, anxious to preserve every one of his many discoveries. Among the considerable fund of albums in the Cabinet des Dessins. Delacroix's "Moroccan" notebooks are some of the most precious, lively expressions of an artist's immediate responses, and the memory of this period was to haunt him for the rest of his life.