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Artist or Maker: Edmé Alexis Alfred Dehodencq (French, 1822-1882)

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Description: Les prisonniers Marocains
signed 'Alfred Dehodencq' (lower left)
oil on canvas
97 x 64 1/2 in. (246 x 164 cm.)

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Provenance: Anonymous sale, Sotheby's, London, 22 November 1983, lot 12.

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Exhibited: Paris, Salon, 1881, no. 636.

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Published: E. Bellier de la Chavignerie and L. Auvroy, Dictionnaire Général des Artistes de l'Ecole Française, Paris, 1885, vol. 2, p. 183.
G. Seailles, Alfred Dehodencq, Histoire d'un Coloriste, Paris, 1885, p. 244.
Gabriel Seailles, Alfred Dehodencq, l'Homme et l'Artiste, Paris, 1910, pp. 174-200, no. 232.
V. Prat, Alfred Dehodencq, Mémoire de l'Ecole du Louvre, Paris, 1975-1977, no. 543.

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Notes: Dehodencq discovered Morocco in 1853 and returned every year over the next decade making endless dynamic sketches which captured the movement of teeming street life. Largely dependant on the Jewish population for his models, he painted Sephardi concerts, weddings and festivities, but also violent, shocking scenes of the arrest and the punishment of the Jews, set in Morocco or in old Moorish Spain (R. Benjamin, Orientalism, Delacroix to Klee, p. 239). Les prisonniers Marocains is a great example of the artist's ability to convey movement and emotion through one of these themes.