皮耶·奧古斯特·雷諾瓦

Private Collection (acquired from the artist)

Pierre Loeb, Paris

Patti Birch, New York (acquired from the above)

Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above by at least 1952)

Acquired by descent from the above

Williamstown, The Sterling & Francine Clark Art institute; Dallas Museum of Art; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, Renoir and Algeria, 2003-04, no. 53, illustrated in color in the catalogue

Good condition. The canvas is lined. There is a stable network of craquelure visible on the surface, particularly in the lower half of the composition. Under UV, there are tiny specks of scattered retouching around the figure to address previous losses, as well as in the upper half of the composition, mostly near the top edge. The retouching is expertly done and does not detract from the over-all appearance of the composition.
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The mystique of North Africa captured the imagination of the most daring painters of the 19th century.  The subject that was most sought out by these artists were depictions of women, who, for reasons of modesty and inaccessibility, were rarely available to pose.  Renoir encountered this very challenge on his second trip to Algeria in 1882, when he painted the present work.  "Here I am more or less installed in Algiers and in negotiations with some Arabs to find models," the artist wrote to Durand-Ruel.  "I have also seen some pretty women.  But I'll tell you later if I have succeeded.  I still need a few days before getting down to work.  I'm making use of it by searching [for sitters], and as soon as I'm in form I want to do as many figures as possible and send back, if I can, some unusual things" (quoted in R. Benjamin, Renoir and Algeria (exhibition catalogue) op. cit., p. 81). 

The allure of Renoir's elusive subject is captured in this sun-splashed depiction from 1882, which depicts the model seated on the staircase of the Mosque of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman, the holiest shrine in Algeria.  Renoir's focus here is on the seated woman, dressed for modesty in her hair and veil and, to the eye of the European painter,  tantalizingly exotic.  Although Renoir had focused on the theme of the Odalisque in the 1870s, he had only conceived of those compositions in his studio, having no access to the authentic experience.  Now, having seen many Islamic women while wandering the streets of the port city, his vision of the women of Algiers was much more true to life.  The figure here, as in his other Algerian portraits of this time, needs none of the accoutrements of the harem to call attention to her alluring presence.

Renoir painted two scenes of this staircase of the Mosque of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman and another of its general surroundings.  Of the two staircase pictures, recent scholarship has debated which of the two compositions was the plein-air version and which was the studio version that Renoir completed in Paris.  The present picture, which appears to be bathed in the golden sunlight of midday, holds truer to Renoir’s temporal approach to painting.  The other picture preserves more of the architectural detail and was probably painted in the studio with the help of photographic documentation.  In his comparison of the present painting with the aforementioned other version, Roger Benjamin has noted that Renoir rendered the foreground zone with a more satisfactory approach: "Renoir suppresses the right-hand balustrated by hiding it behind a great whiling mass of green plants.  This gives a centralized focus to the picture and squares up the foreground zone in which he now places two cross-legged women firmly into the picture space.  They are more fully painted, again in hair and veil.  Renoir plays suggestively with the revealed eyes of the foreground woman, whose pink caraco is visible under her half-opened haik" (R. Benjamin, Renoir and Algeria (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 56).