Mosque at Algiers

On 1 March 1882 the Impressionists opened their seventh group show in Paris, on the rue Saint-Honoré, with 25 paintings by Renoir on the walls, Luncheon of the Boating Party among them. Renoir himself was not in the room. A few weeks earlier he had come down with pneumonia while staying with Paul Cézanne at L'Estaque, near Marseille, and he spent that spring recovering in Algiers, a city he had already visited the year before. This small canvas was painted during that stay. It shows the mosque of Sidi Abderrahmane in the Casbah, which holds the tomb of the 15th-century scholar revered as the patron saint of Algiers. The building is whitewashed, yet Renoir let its walls turn blue in the southern light. In the lower right corner he signed it simply Renoir, with the year 82.