The Women of Algiers

Women of Algiers in their Apartment (French: Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement) is the title of two oil on canvas paintings by the French Orientalist painter Eugène Delacroix.

Delacroix's first version of Women of Algiers was painted in Paris in 1834 and is located in the Louvre, Paris, France. The second work, painted fifteen years later between 1847 and 1849, is located at the Musee Fabre, Montpellier, France. The two works both depict the same scene of four women together in an enclosed room. Despite the similar setting, the two paintings evoke completely different moods through the depiction of the women. Delacroix's earlier 1834 work captures the separation between the women and the viewer. The second painting instead invites the viewer into the scene through the warm inviting gaze of the woman.

Women of Algiers, along with Delacroix's other Orientalist paintings, has inspired many artists of later generations. In 1888 both Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin travelled to Montpellier to view Delacroix's 1849 version of Women of Algiers. The painting served as a source of inspiration to the later impressionists, and a series of 15 paintings and numerous drawings by Pablo Picasso in 1954.

Paul Cezanne described Delacroix's intoxicating colour play's as "All this luminous colour...It seems to me that it enters the eye like a glass of wine running into your gullet and it makes you drunk straight away".

The 1834 painting was first displayed at the 1834 Salon in Paris, where it received mixed reviews. The art critic Gustave Plance wrote in a review for Revue des deux mondes that Delacroix's painting Femmes d'Alger dans leur Appartement was about painting and nothing more, painting that is fresh, vigorous, advanced with spirit, and of an audacity completely venetian, yet yielding nothing to the masters it recalls. King Louis Philippe purchased the painting in 1834 and presented it to the Musée du Luxembourg. In 1874 the painting was moved to the Louvre, Paris where it remains today as part of the permanent collection.

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