Sleeping Odalisque

In 1834 Delacroix showed his Women of Algiers, a harem interior with slippers lying abandoned on the floor, and the picture is now in the Louvre. Renoir said there was no more beautiful painting in the world. He went to Algiers himself in 1881 and 1882. Between 1915 and 1917, in his last years at Cagnes, he was still painting odalisques. The museum's second title for this one is Odalisque with Slippers. A young woman lounges on yellow cushions, naked to the waist, with a white cloth across her lap and a red curtain behind her. On her feet she keeps a pair of dark babouches, the soft backless shoes of North Africa. The small canvas belonged to the collector Jacques Zoubaloff until his sale in 1927, and Dr Albert Charpentier and his wife gave it to the French state in 1951.