The Women of Algiers

Three women lounge among cushions, pipes, and gleaming tilework in the dim, perfumed interior of a Algiers harem, a servant drawing back a curtain at the right. Delacroix had glimpsed such a room on his journey to North Africa, and he renders it in glowing, jewel-like color and hushed intimacy. Now in the Louvre, the Women of Algiers became the touchstone of nineteenth-century Orientalism, an entrancing if fantasized vision of a hidden world - so admired that Picasso later painted an entire series of variations wrestling with its color and its languorous mystery.