Executed in 1881 during one of Renoir’s two winters spent in Algeria, La Baie d’Alger is a luminous jewel within the artist’s oeuvre. As the only Impressionist who engaged with the nineteenth-century aesthetic so-called “Orientalism,” favored by Romantic artists such as Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix, Renoir was among the first to translate a non-French landscape into the Impressionist visual language. As Roger Benjamin argues in Renoir and Algeria, “Within the history of Orientalism, I would claim that Renoir was the only painter to endow the scenery of the city of Algiers in the nineteenth century—extremely popular in both painting and photography—with a consummate, state-of-the-art modern pictorial treatment.” (in Exh. Cat. Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Institute (and traveling), Renoir and Algeria, 2003, p. 4).

The present work is part of a rare series of landscapes that Renoir executed from different perspectives around the bay. The other two are Les Arabes au bord de la mer, 1881-82 and Champ de bananiers, Algiers, 1881, the latter of which is held in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay (see Figs. 2 and 3). Drawn to the tropical vegetation and brilliant blue sea, Renoir captured the landscape of Algiers with a view of the city beyond. At this point in his career, Renoir was moving away from the Impressionist desire to capture the fleeting and the spontaneous, turning instead to the formal lessons of classical landscape painting to construct a more structured composition, albeit with a special attention to capturing the scene’s natural color.

The present work exhibits Renoir’s virtuosic mastery of clouds and fascination with the whiteness of the Algiers landscape. He wrote, "In Algeria I discovered white. Everything is white, the burnouses, the walls, the minaret, the road" (the artist quoted in Exh. Cat., Renoir, London, 1985, p. 226). Indeed, the central building of the composition is believed to be a marabout, or shrine, of the revered holy man Sidi Belal. This tomb was significant to Algerians, as it was believed to be the site of an annual festival called Aid-el Foul, which involved dancing around the saint’s shrine. In La Baie d’Alger, Renoir captures both the marabout and the suggestion of the white-topped city in the background, complementing the brilliant greens and blues that pepper the foreground of the canvas. Tropical vegetation such as carob trees, cactus, and aloe plants are rendered with Renoir’s characteristic painterly brushstrokes that infuse vitality and texture into the scene. “I have never seen anything more sumptuous and more fertile,” Renoir wrote of the landscape at Algiers. “...a marvelous green with the mixture of prickly pear and aloes in the hedges…and on the other side the sea, eternally cheerful and almost always blue, a sea into which one feels like diving" (the artist quoted in B.E. White, Renoir, His Life, Art and Letters, New York, 1984, p. 105). The present work exquisitely captures Renoir’s heartfelt enthusiasm and appreciation for the scene before him, serving as one of the finest examples of Impressionism’s far-reaching presence outside of France.