In broad, heavy brushstrokes a woman confronts the viewer’s gaze. She stares outside the confines of her painted realm, lavishly dressed and bejeweled in Eastern style. Algérienne, painted by Eugène Delacroix, is a typical genre scene of Orientalism, displaying a uniquely garbed woman—possibly belonging to a harem—confronting her Western viewer. Delacroix, as French painter of the nineteenth century, frequented the Middle East and sketched throughout his travels. The woman depicted here is similar to the subject of Women of Algiers, Delacroix’s famous work, which displays three women in a constructed harem scene. In that work, Delacroix utilized Jewish models rather than the local Arabic populace due to religious and social constraints. The same might have occurred within Algérienne, with such little information on the model available. Additionally, she is remarkably visually similar to the Women of Algiers.
Delacroix’s homogenization of Algerian culture adheres to the themes of romanticism shown in this exhibit. The female model loses her personal identity and is further erased by the heavily constructed orientalist motifs. What Delacroix has created is a counterfeit of the truth, painted in the broadest and heaviest strokes.