During his time in North Africa, Delacroix made many sketches of the people and the city, subjects to which he would return until the end of his life. The unusual large canvas Fanatics of Tangier (1838), housed in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, presents a frenzied scene of the Aissaouan brotherhood, which the artist had first hand experience of witnessing. A Sufi brotherhood that would annually meet in August at the tomb of their founder Sidi Mohammed Ben Aissa, these religious fanatics would engage in many unusual activities, while enlisting new converts and raising funds for their cause. Hidden in an attic, fearing for his life if discovered, Delacroix watched the gathering while sketching away. Reportedly, the members of the sect were, “rolling themselves on embers, eating snakes, grinding glass, chewing fire, slashing their flesh, quivering in spasms like charged frogs… in a sacred epilepsy.”
Delacroix began work on Fanatics of Tangier in autumn 1837, his notebooks filled with plenty of useful material and the canvas was presented at the Salon of 1838. Although somewhat eclipsed by his Medea about to Kill Her Children in the same Salon, Fanatics of Tangier was celebrated for its lively brushstrokes, ably summoning up the frenzy of the zealous subjects. The English review in The Times declared the painting to be the ‘most outstanding’ in the show, even if the subject was ‘a little disagreeable’.