ABSTRACT
This contribution tells of the professional beginnings of Spain’s most internationally recognized artist in the nineteenth century, Marià Fortuny Marsal (Reus, 1838–Rome, 1874), as a painter of the Hispano-Moroccan War (1859–1860). To do so, he traveled to the scene of the war in the first months of 1860 and made hundreds of sketches that he later used in his Roman studio as the basis for the pictorial compositions of the armed conflict. In addition, his stay in Morocco also gave him the opportunity to depict the world and the life of Muslims in numerous drawings that later would inspire orientalist art and would turn him into one of the most significant painters in this genre. At the same time, his modern style and spontaneous execution, in which light and color played a significant role, seduced the young artists of his generation, for whom his paintings became a model to imitate.
