BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

By Alexandra A Jopp Eugene Delacroix, as one of the most significant French painters of the Romantic era and the first male painter in the 19th century to paint a harem from first-hand experience, has a special place in the history of Orientalism in art. During an 1832 trip across North Africa, Delacroix met a local sultan who honored the European visitor by giving him a rare look inside the Muslim world, a look that included the opportunity to see that most exotic feature of Islamic culture, the harem. When Delacroix returned to France, he recreated the scene he had witnessed with models and produced Algerian Women in Their Apartment. Eugene Delacroix. Algerian Women in Their Apartment, 1834. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Compared to most harem scenes, the painting, in Tom Prideaux’ words, is “a triumph of sensual delicacy” ( 107 ). Cezanne remarked that the color of the red slippers belonging to the three women in the harem in Delacroix’s painting “goes into one’s eyes like a gl...

By Alexandra A Jopp This post is for people interested in European Orientalist painters. The next series of posts will offer a quick tour of Orientalist art as it developed in Europe during the 19th century (1798-1914.) I will focus on the following collection of images: Odalisques depicted in all their sensuality, bathers, and other harem scenes surrounded by myriad colours and fabrics. My aim is to create a central online place for images and resources on the topic. This includes the material I added/wrote myself and images that I found on the web. For the purposes of this blog, I will refer to the Orientalism as to an art-historical term. In this restrictive meaning, the term will be related to a small French group of artists of the 19th century who took the Maghreb and the Middle East as their subject matter. Orientalism, Victor Hugo observed, had a major impact on French and English culture in the 19th century. “There is more interest in the East nowadays than there has ever...