AFTER EUGENE DELACROIX (LATE 19TH CENTURY)Les femmes d'algerOil on canvas32.5 x 41cmDelacroix’s trip to Morocco and Tangier in the company of the Comte de Mornay in 1832 marked a turning point in his life. He was one of the earliest painters to visit and record life in North Africa, and he was intoxicated by the sights, sounds and smells that he experienced.Of the two recorded versions of Delacroix'sTheWomen of Algiers in their apartment, after which the present work is painted, the original version painted in 1834 and exhibited in the Paris Salon of the same year is in the Musée du Louvre; the version from the late 1840s is in the Musée Fabre, Montpellier.Delacroix's much vaunted visit to a harem in Algiers in 1832 dates from a number of years later when the story was written up in the magazine L'Art in 1883, based on the reminiscences of the Comte de Mornay and the painter Charles Cornault. Cornault recounted that Delacroix wanted '...to visit the interior of a house, where he could draw Moorish women... The women, who had been warned, put on their most beautiful clothes, and Delacroix used them as models for watercolour sketches which he afterwards used to paint his picture of The Women of Algiers.' Cornault continued: Among orientals the women of Algiers are considered the most beautiful on the Barbary coast. They know how to set off their beauty against rich silk cloth and velvet embroidered with gold... (quoted in Timothy Wilson-Smith, Delacroix, A Life, London, 1992, p. 108)