A courtyard in Morocco

Delacroix travelled to Morocco in the winter of 1832 as official artist to the French diplomatic mission visiting the sultan. During this trip the artist depicted every aspect of life in Morocco - from local peasants to the nobility - in a number of sketchbooks and some highly finished drawings. The present drawing must come from one of the sketchbooks made then and it can be compared to Studies of Arabs and architecture, a drawing showing a similar façade, which is made up of two sheets of the same size as this drawing, now in the Louvre (Inv. RF 10085; B. Brahim Alaoui et al., Delacroix: Le voyage au Maroc, exhib. cat., Paris, Institut du Monde arabe, 1995, no. 12).