Algerian Woman

Renoir sailed for Algiers in the spring of 1881 and stayed about a month, then went back the following year. He was going where Delacroix had gone in 1832. Delacroix's North African pictures were among the things Renoir had studied in the Louvre, and by the 1880s the crossing had become something French painters did. Algeria had been under French rule for 50 years by then, and Algiers had a European quarter along the harbour, steamers from Marseille, and the old Casbah stacked up the hill behind it. Renoir worked small and quickly there. This head of a woman is one of the results, and the rest of what he carried home is gardens, a ravine outside the city, a street festival, and a few more heads like this one.