EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

If a major artist from France, Spain, or Italy places a horse horizontally across the picture plane, it may well suggest an easel which in Romance languages derives from horse. In French, for Delacroix, chevalet. That suggests that the Arab is Delacroix's imagination of himself on the other side of his easel. The viewer is, as it were, inside "the canvas" watching the artist "paint" the horse in the mirror of his mind. The reflection of "Delacroix", his arm extended, "paints" it.

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The Arab's turban, however suitable for the scene, refers back to those worn by artists for hundreds of years to keep paint off their hair. Van Eyck and Rembrandt, among others, wear them in self-portraits.

This turbaned groom, though, also holds a piece of rope like the one above the artist's signature which, at the very bottom of this detail, is drawn in the same dark brown ink. Its duplication reinforces its metaphoric representation as Delacroix's "paintbrush."

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The discarded saddle is portrayed as a still-life in the right-hand corner which, as one specialist noted, is characteristic of Delacroix in that it "establishes contact with the viewer." Yet there is almost always a signature twist within the still-life. The back of the saddle forms a large D for Delacroix while some parallel lines within it may have been intended as an E for Eugène, as in other watercolors.

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In this beautiful drawing Delacroix has fused the actions of his craft with his memory of Morocco, implying that the groom's attempt to restrain the frisky horse is an allegory of his own creative struggle to fix the fleeting image in his mind on paper.

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Elsewhere, EPPH has revealed how horses by Velazquez, Delacroix and Manet also signify easels in the "studio of their mind".