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Dimensions: 17.5 by 25cm., 6¾ by 9¾in. (image size)

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Provenance: Comte de Mornay, Paris
Sale: Vente de Mornay, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 29 March 1877, lot 4
Marquis de Lavalette (acquired at the above sale for 615fr); thence by descent to his widow Georgina, née Flahault, on his death in 1881, until her death in 1907; thence by descent to the present owner

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Literature: Alfred Robaut, L'Oeuvre complet d'Eugène Delacroix, Paris, 1885, p. 132, no. 495, catalogued
Lee Johnson, 'Towards a reconstruction of Delacroix's Mornay Album', Burlington Magazine, February 2003, pp. 92-95, discussed and catalogued; p. 94, fig. 33, illustrated

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Notes: Executed in 1832, Vue de la rade et de la ville de Tanger is from the suite of eighteen signed watercolours that Delacroix executed for the Comte de Mornay while travelling in the Count's party on a diplomatic mission to Morocco instigated by Louis Philippe to meet with the Sultan at Meknes, Morocco. The eighteen Mornay watercolours were dispersed at the Count's estate sale in 1877, and the whereabouts of the present work has only recently come to light.

In an article on the album that highlights the re-discovery of the present work, the late Lee Johnson lists the locations of all but two of the suite (Lee Johnson, 'Towards a Reconstruction of Delacroix's Mornay Album', Burlington Magazine, February 2003, pp. 92-95). Many of the other examples from the album are now in public collections, including The Louvre Museum, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.; Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main and the Fine Art Museum, San Francisco.

The subjects that Delacroix selected to record during the trip range from portraits of dignitaries in formal attire and studies of local types in costume to views of military encampments, soldiers sleeping and dramatic spectacles that Delacroix and Mornay had witnessed together. Lee Johnson describes the present work as 'exceptional', being the only marine view in the suite. He conjectures that the identity of the standing figure in the present work may indeed be the 'Capitaine du Port' of Tangier, '...since his features bear a marked resemblance to those in two pen-and-ink sketches of a head noted by Delacroix as "tete (sic) du capitaine du port a Tanger" on a sheet of miscellaneous notes and drawings that post-date the Moroccan journey. This water colour [the present work] is also distinctive as one of the subjects which were not treated in later variants.... The only painting which might be considered a variant is the expansive View of Tangier from the seashore of 1858, where the man on the left, who appears to be supervising the beaching of the boat, could be another evocation of the Captain of the Port'. Lee Johnson also notes the existence of a detailed pencil study for the present watercolour. (Burlington Magazine, op. cit., p. 94, discussed)