Albert Pinkham Ryder's visit to Tangier, during an 1882 trip to Morocco may have inspired this image of a solitary scout, dressed in a white cloak and holding a rifle at the ready. Typical of the artist's visionary style, the horseman appears almost miragelike out of a heat-seared desert landscape. This Orientalist subject may have been inspired by the earlier French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, whose similar paintings were exhibited by Ryder's New York art dealer.