Eugène Delacroix
French, 1798-1863

View of Tangier from the Seashore, 1856-1858
Oil on canvas,
31 5/16 x 39 5/16"

Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Bequest of Mrs. Erasmus C. Lindley in memory of her father, James J. Hill
49.4

COMMENTS

This painting has been known by various general titles, such as "Les côtes du Maroc" or "Côte barbaresque," but Moreau-Nélaton was surely correct in identifying it as the picture that Delacroix began to paint for the dealer Tedesco on 8 July 1856, and which he call specifically “View of Tangier from the Seashore.”

The entire setting is closely based on a pencil drawing of the site, without figures or boat, preserved in an album of studies from the North African journey in the Louvre. Delacroix first rendered a view of this hilly coast, without the city, in a water-color done in the straits of Gibraltar as his ship approached Tangier on 23 January 1832. A much later drawing, directly preliminary to the painted composition, has the boat - with sail hoisted - and the coast on the right instead of on the left; the figures appear to be Arabs, though they cannot be identified with certainty.

The first idea for the composition occurred to Delacroix when, with his cousin Bornot, he helped some struggling mariners to haul their boat ashore near Fécamp. It is in any case likely that Delacroix has poetically mingled impressions of French fishing-boats on the coast of Normandy with more distant reminiscences of North Africa. He was intensely interested in the sea and in boats of any kinds during his holidays at Dieppe in 1854 and 1855, and, during the earlier stay, mentioned that a scene he watched of fishermen beaching and unloading their boat would make "a lovely subject for a painting."

- Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix, A Critical Catalog, v. III, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 206

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Presented at an 1860 exhibition on the Boulevard des Italiens, this painting inspired rhapsodic praise from critics including Théophile Gautier and Zacharie Astruc. Like many of Delacroix‘s Moroccan works made in his Paris studio, this scene is a synthesis of disparate places and experiences. It combines the remembered Tangier landscape, assisted by drawings and watercolors from an album of studies made during his North African experience, with an anecdotal figural group observed in the resort town of Fécamp located off the northern coast of France.

- Delacroix and the Matter of Finish, 2013