Algerian Girl

Renoir sailed for Algeria twice in 1881, after the light Delacroix had brought back from North Africa nearly 50 years earlier, which had been selling well ever since. He found that Muslim women would not sit for him, so he hired French settlers instead, put them in local clothes and darkened their hair with the brush. This is one of those pictures. It went to his dealer Durand-Ruel in Paris the following spring and eventually crossed to the firm's New York branch. In 1913 it was hung in the Armory Show, the exhibition that gave American audiences their first big dose of modern European painting, and later that year a Boston collector, Hannah Edwards, bought it from the New York gallery. It came to the Museum of Fine Arts on her bequest in 1939.