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Provenance: (possibly) The artist's posthumous sale, Paris, Drouot, 30 January 1877, lot 17.
(possibly) M. Desprez, Paris.
J.C. Paz, Argentine Ambassador to Paris, circa 1885.
Thence by descent to his wife.
Acquired from the above by the present owners in 1938.

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Exhibited: (possibly) Paris, École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Exposition des oeuvres de Eugène Fromentin, March 1877, no. 68.

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Literature: J. Thompson and B. Wright, La vie et l'Oeuvre d'Eugène Fromentin, Paris, 1987, p. 226.

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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF THE CIRCULO MILITAR, BUENOS AIRES
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 15% on the buyer's premium
The present work is one of a series of large-scale vertical format paintings executed by Fromentin of Arabs attacked in a gorge, variously describing Arabs attacked by a lion and, later, by a raiding party, all dominated by the rearing horse and rider on the right of the composition. The treatment of the former variant of the subject culminated in a painting exhibited at the Salon of 1868 (fig. 1), while the latter was taken up again in the 1870s in several small, and at least two large-scale versions, of which Professor James Thompson describes the present work as "the biggest and most important version" (email of October 6, 2009).

Fromentin's dramatic subject matter and vibrant palette hark back respectively to the works of Horace Vernet and Eugène Delacroix, while the strong emphasis on muscular form also shows a clear debt to Théodore Géricault. Overall, the composition is unusually Romantic and powerful, exuding a sense of explosive power, with a balanced tension between the rearing horse and the figures attacking from the left.

Fromentin's paintings are typically characterised by a soft palette, and great sensitivity to his subject matter; they illustrate and expand on his own extensive travels to Algeria, which he wrote about to great critical acclaim, in a language of shimmering, but restrained energy, which reflects Fromentin's measured character. The great poet, Charles Baudelaire, saw a literary and soft quality in Fromentin's work, far removed from the more staged compositions of many other Orientalist painters. Writing of Fromentin in his review of the 1859 Salon, Baudelaire remarked:

"He is precisely neither a landscape nor a genre painter. These two fields are too restrictive to accommodate his broad and supple imagination. If I said of him that we was a narrator of journeys, I wouldn't be doing him justice; for there are many travellers with neither poetry nor soul, and his soul is one of the most poetic and precious that I know. His painting is sober, powerful, measured, and proceeds obviously from Eugène Delacroix. We find in him also that natural and skilful sense of colour, so rare among us. And light and heat, which send some artists into a kind of tropical madness...fill him only with a sense of calm and quiet contemplation. It is not difficult to understand the love he feels towards the nobility of a patriarchal existence, and the interest with which he ponders these people in whom survives something of the heroism of the Antique."

The present work was acquired by José Camilo Paz during his ambassadorship to Paris, where he was posted in 1885. Previously ambassador in Madrid, Paz was a major public figure in Argentina, who also founded the newspaper La Prensa. The painting has until now hung in the Palacio Paz, which Paz bought off-plan from the architect Louis-Marie-Henri Sortais at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. The palace was still unfinished at Paz's death in 1912, although his wife and children lived there from 1914 to 1938, when the house and its entire contents was bought by the Circulo Militar.