Le turc à la selle

The Turk with a Saddle from 1837 at the Louvre shows an Orientalist figure study. Delacroix's Turkish and Moroccan subjects created a visual vocabulary of the exotic East that dominated French painting for decades. As the leading French Romantic painter, Delacroix brought passionate color and dynamic energy to all his subjects; his journal records his constant study of color relationships and his admiration for Rubens, Constable, and Veronese. Eugène Delacroix, the greatest painter of the French Romantic movement, combined the emotional intensity and coloristic ambition of his Romantic program with a classical learning that made his art simultaneously revolutionary and deeply rooted in the European tradition. His visits to Rubens's works in Belgium, his admiration for Constable's color which he encountered at the Salon of 1824, and his long study of Venetian colorism were the foundations of a painting practice that combined observation, emotion, and historical imagination in ways that no French painter had previously achieved. His journals and correspondence document one of the most intellectually rigorous artistic minds of the nineteenth century.

The figure is rendered with rich color and energetic handling. Delacroix's warm palette and Orientalist detail create an atmospheric exotic scene.