Houston Museum Buys Delacroix Discovery

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/arts/design/delacroix-museum-of-fine-arts-houston.html

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The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has acquired a long-lost early version of Eugène Delacroix’s famed 1834 masterpiece, “Women of Algiers in Their Apartment,” that hangs at the Louvre in Paris.

The sumptuously colored 18-inch-high canvas, showing an elaborately dressed woman and a maidservant in a Moorish interior, had been in a Paris apartment until the private collector who owned it, suspecting it might be a Delacroix, reached out to the French art dealer Philippe Mendes in 2018.

His research revealed the work to have been owned by Count Charles-Edgar de Mornay. In 1832, the count led a French diplomatic mission to North Africa, and Delacroix, eager to experience the culture there, accompanied him. The painting disappeared from public sight when the count sold it at auction in 1850.

During Delacroix’s six-month journey, a port authority official in Algiers, who was a Muslim, took the unusual step of inviting the artist into his home and allowing him to sketch the women of his household. The reclining woman in the Houston canvas, painted a year after the visit, is derived from one of those studies. The slightly later, much larger Louvre canvas, painted in landscape rather than portrait format, includes two more female figures recorded in those sketches. That pioneering work, depicting an intimate North African subject on a monumental scale, was one of the star pieces in the 2018 Delacroix retrospective organized by the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Delacroix painted a third version of the subject in 1847-49. Just over a century later, Picasso painted more than a dozen versions of Delacroix’s “Women of Algiers.”

“We didn’t know he created a first version of the composition,” said Gary Tinterow, the Margaret Alkek Williams director of the museum in Houston. “It shows us how Delacroix composed in an additive fashion.”

The work in Houston, purchased for an undisclosed sum from Mr. Mendes, has been authenticated by the leading Delacroix expert, Virginie Cauchi-Fatiga. It will be shown in Houston starting Oct. 3.

Mr. Tinterow said that Delacroix was the first artist to introduce North African motifs to the Paris Salon. “This makes a fine Orientalist painting by Delacroix, a holy grail for collectors of his work,” he said. He noted that the painting was made shortly after France invaded Algeria in 1830.

Roberta Smith co-chief art critic at The New York Times, writing about the Louvre version of the painting in a review of the 2018 retrospective, said, “Criticisms that this and similar works amplify the male gaze with colonialist power dynamics are well deserved, but the scale and self-containment of these women are welcome in a show where so many are presented for display, abducted or killed.”