The picture The painting depicts
Muhammad XI, the last
Nasrid ruler of
Granada, turning to take his final look at the city from the
Puerto del Suspiro del Moro before going into exile. Boabdil was upbraided by his mother,
Aixa; “weep like a woman for the kingdom you could not defend like a man.” 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”. 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". The
Treaty of Granada, also known as the Capitulations, agreed in 1491 between
Boabdil and
Ferdinand and Isabella, was signed on 2 January 1492. The Alhambra had been surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabell's troops on the previous day. The treaty concluded the
Granada War and brought to an end over 700 years of
Arab rule in Spain which had begun with the
Umayyad conquest in 711.
The artist 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. 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."
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. The picture was sold at auction in 2018 for €240.000, and remains privately owned. In 2021 the painting was declared an
Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC). ==Description==