Die Frauen von Algier in ihrem Gemach

France had seized Algiers only a few years before Delacroix travelled to North Africa in 1832, and on that trip he managed to get inside a private household, sketching in the women's rooms where a European man was not supposed to be. Back in Paris he built this from those notes and showed it at the Salon of 1834. Three women sit among cushions, silks and a hookah in a warm, shuttered interior, while a fourth, an enslaved servant, turns to leave at the right. Rather than a made-up fantasy of the harem, it carries the detail of things he had actually seen, down to the patterns of the tiles. King Louis-Philippe bought it that same year. More than a century on, Picasso became fixated on it and painted 15 versions of his own.