Odalisque

By 1870 France had held Algeria for 40 years, and Paris had a long appetite for scenes of the harem it imagined there. Renoir, not yet 30 and years away from the Impressionism he would help invent, fed that appetite the easy way. He rented a vaguely North African costume, hung a few decorative pieces around his studio, and posed a Parisian model as a woman of Algiers. He never went to Algeria. What he cared about was the colour, the blue and gold silks and the way light catches embroidery, and unlike the tradition he borrowed from, he kept his sitter fully dressed. He showed it at the Salon that spring as Femme d'Alger, a bow to Delacroix, whose own Women of Algiers he admired. Within months France was at war with Prussia.