Women of Algiers
In 1888 both Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin travelled to Montpellier to view Delacroix's 1849 version of Women of Algiers.
The fourth woman is a black enslaved person who exits the scene, looking over her left shoulder towards the seated women.
Delacroix perfectly rendered the features of the women's clothing, adornments, and the interior decor in great detail.
Ultimately Delacroix's stolen glance into the Algerian harem provided him with little visual information to create a realistic image.
With these gaps in visual information Delacroix fills the voids with his own European interpretation, resulting in a subtler version of the fantasy female.
With the exposed décolletage, loose unbounded clothing and languid poses, Delacroix's Algerian females are still situated in the European oriental dream.
[8] Towards the end of 1831 King Louis Phillipe sent a diplomatic party to Morocco in order to establish friendly relations and negotiate a treaty with the Sultan.
As soon as he would seek to sketch them from afar, the Arabic women who would hang their washing out on roof terraces would immediately alert their husbands.
This ignorant understanding had been developing since the seventeenth century with the introduction of Chinese and Japanese culture and aesthetics into Europe by the Jesuits.
French fascination again increased during the Greek revolution in 1821–30, during which time Victor Hugo authored the volume of poems Les Orientales and Delacroix contributed two paintings, The Massacre at Chios (1824) and Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Messolonghi (1826).
European male artists were unable to obtain access to the harem and so relied upon visits to brothels and their own imagination to conjure a fantasy image of the space.
Research has shown that even first hand accounts by female artists and writers who had the opportunity to enter local harems were slightly embellished.
[19] The enormously popular book of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries painted a picture of a timeless fantasy world of exotic adventure.
The influence of this tale on travelling artist's first hand absorption and interpretation of visual information is discussed in Mary Roberts's book Intimate Outsiders.
In a letter to Alexis de Tocqueville several years after his trip he mentioned, "Never in my life have I observed anything more bizarre than the first sight of Tangier.
The women on the left wears a lower plunging neckline revealing her décolletage and she now stares softly at the viewer with a warm, inviting gaze.
The European concept of the harem further implants itself within Delacroix's work, ultimately creating a painting that objectifies and eroticizes the Algerian women to a greater extent than the original 1834 version.
