ABSTRACT
The interest of Eugène Delacroix in Algiers fashion had tangible repercussions on painters and photographers for more than a century. This chapter deals with the styles and representations of the Algiers costume in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western art. It investigates the evolution of the forms and practices of Algerian female dress in the early years of French colonization and its interpretation by European male artists. With Women of Algiers in their Apartment, Delacroix crossed boundaries between East and West and between North and South, allowing for a more careful examination and elucidation of the renewal of Algiers dress as the material evidence of culturally and socially ambivalent realities in the context of French domination. The ethnographic value of the travel sketches that led to the realization of the masterpiece shows how much Delacroix’s heritage had been distorted by the following generations of artists, who produced stereotyped representations despite the fact that Algerian women negotiated and redesigned their bodily image and dress. Following the evolution of Algiers women’s style through the work of Delacroix, Renoir and orientalist painters and photographers, this chapter deals more broadly with the portrayal of colonized women in Western visual arts.
