The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment
Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) · 1834
Three women sit at ease in a shaded interior in Algiers while a black servant, seen from behind, lifts a curtain and turns to look at them. The woman at the left leans on cushions with a hand at her cheek; the two in the centre are close together, one holding the tube of a hookah whose bowl stands on the floor between them. The room is closed and dim, the walls tiled and painted, a cupboard door open at the back, and the light falls softly on silks, embroidered jackets, striped trousers and bare feet. Nothing happens. The subject is simply the atmosphere of the place.
Delacroix had travelled to Morocco and Algeria in eighteen thirty two, and in Algiers he was allowed, briefly, into a private apartment where he made rapid watercolour notes of the women and their costumes. Back in Paris he turned those notes into this large canvas. The colour is the thing to study: reds, greens and golds are placed against one another so that each intensifies the next, and small accents, the coral of a necklace, the yellow of a slipper, hold the eye. The paint is applied thinly in the shadows and thickly in the highlights, giving the fabrics real weight. The picture is signed and dated at the lower right, eighteen thirty four.
Shown at the Salon of eighteen thirty four, it was bought by the state the same year. Renoir called it the most beautiful painting in the world, Cézanne admired its colour, and Picasso painted a series of variations on it in the nineteen fifties. Delacroix himself returned to the subject in a smaller, darker version now in Montpellier. It remains the most influential of all his paintings drawn from his North African journey.
Did You Know? Picasso painted fifteen variations on this picture in the winter of nineteen fifty four to fifty five, and one of them later became one of the most expensive paintings ever sold.
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