The painting depicts Muhammad XII, the last NasridrulerofGranada, turning to take his final look at the city from the Puerto del Suspiro del Moro before going into exile.[1][a][4] Boabdil was upbraided by his mother, Aixa; “weep like a woman for the kingdom you could not defend like a man.”[5] Historians have generally followed Aixa in condemning Boabdil, but a 21st-century revisionist view by Elizabeth Drayson, a historian at the University of Cambridge, sees him as; “a last stand against religious intolerance, fanatical power and cultural ignorance”.[6][b] The writer Giles Tremlett, in his 2012 study, Ghosts of Spain, notes the traditional name for the road Boabdil took, "La Cuesta de Las Lágrimas - the Slope of Tears".[4]
Francisco Pradilla Ortiz (1848-1921) served brief terms as director, firstly of the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome and then at the Prado Museum, but worked primarily as a practising artist.[11] Pradilla enjoyed great success in his career, his entry in the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga catalogue describing him as "one of the foremost Spanish painters of the last quarter of the 19th century [and] the last great master of history painting of the century."[12]The Sigh of the Moor was begun at around the same time as Pradilla’s The Surrender of Granada, commissioned by the Spanish Senate, the upper house of the Cortes Generales, in 1879. However, Pradilla appears not to have completed it until around 1892.[13] The picture was sold at auction in 2018 for €240.000,[14] and remains privately owned.[15] In 2021 the painting was declared an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC).[16]
The painting is oil-on-canvas and is 1.95m high and 3.02m wide.[17] The focus of the image is the landscape around Granada, and it depicts Boabdil, dismounted and with a small band of followers behind him, staring back at the city from the mountain pass.[16]
^The site of Boabdil’s grave is a matter of dispute. Generally thought to have died and been buried in Fez in Morocco, another alternative is in Tlemcen, Algeria.[7]
