La Mosquée

In the spring of 1881 Renoir sailed to Algiers, chasing the light that had transformed Delacroix's painting a generation earlier. Algeria had been under French rule for about 50 years, and for a month Renoir wandered a city that gave him colour he said he could never have found at home. This canvas shows a crowd pressed around a handful of musicians at some street celebration, below the crumbling old Turkish ramparts. Behind them the white domes and minarets of the Kasbah climb the hill, and beyond that lies the blue of the Mediterranean. He never learned exactly what festival he had wandered into, and the title has drifted ever since between a mosque, an Arab feast, and a fantasia.