Turc fumant, assis sur un divan

Turk Smoking on a Divan from 1837 at the Louvre is an Orientalist study combining figure painting with rich interior decoration. Such images created a vision of Eastern leisure that fascinated European audiences. Delacroix executed the work with his characteristic broken, energetic brushwork and rich colorism, building up his surfaces in ways that directly influenced the Impressionists who studied his technique at the Louvre after his death. Delacroix's journey to Morocco in 1832 with the French diplomatic mission to Sultan Abd ar-Rahman was the most transformative experience of his artistic life. The color, light, and visual culture of North Africa provided him with material that he mined for decades afterward: the costumes, the architecture, the quality of light on walls and figures, the animals and the people, all recorded in extensive sketchbooks that became an inexhaustible resource. His Oriental subjects combined ethnographic observation with the Romantic imagination of an ancient civilization that had preserved something of the antique world that Europe had lost — a living antiquity that his painting could make present for Parisian audiences who would never travel to Morocco themselves.

The reclining figure is rendered with rich Orientalist color and atmospheric detail. Delacroix's warm palette creates an atmosphere of exotic languor.