Parisiennes in Algerian Costume, or Harem
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 to 1919) · 1872
Four women lounge in a room hung with patterned fabrics, dressed in embroidered jackets, gauzy trousers and jewelled headdresses. The one in the centre is half undressed and looks straight out at you, while a companion fastens a bracelet on her wrist and another, in a red turban, reclines on cushions. The title gives the game away. These are not women of Algiers but Parisian models, among them Renoir's favourite Lise Trehot, dressed up in oriental costume in a Paris studio. The picture is a piece of theatre and it knows it.
Renoir painted it in 1872, when he was thirty one and still trying to make his name at the official Salon. The model is Delacroix, whose Women of Algiers he had copied in the Louvre, and you can see the older painter in the hot colour and the piled-up fabrics. But the handling is already Renoir's own: look at the pearly skin of the central figure, painted with soft, feathery strokes, and the way the flowered wall behind seems to melt into the costumes. The Salon jury rejected the painting anyway, and two years later Renoir would exhibit with the first Impressionist group instead.
The canvas came to Kojiro Matsukata through the Paris dealers in the nineteen twenties and was among the works held in France until 1959. It is one of the largest early Renoirs outside Europe and a rare chance to see the painter before he found his Impressionist touch. Notice the gilded slipper abandoned in the foreground and the tea things on the floor: small, luxurious details that were meant to seduce a Salon audience and still work on us today.
Did You Know? Lise Trehot, who posed for the central figure, appears in some twenty of Renoir's paintings between 1866 and 1872, then married an architect and never sat for him again.
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