Orientalist Aesthetics_ Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930 ( PDFDrive )

figure 9
Eugène Fromentin,
photographic carte de

visite, ca. 1870.

That trenchant text was one of a number that make 1875– 76 a crucial time in the debates on Ori-
entalism. As if to replenish his flagging creativity, Fromentin returned to writing about art in 1875,
publishing his Maîtres d’autrefois (Fig. 9). His doubts about the repetitive imagery of his own Ori-
entalism reached new heights in 1876, the year of his failed candidacy at the Académie Française and
subsequent premature death. Strangely enough, he took the opportunity to comment sympathetically
on his own recent paintings from Egypt, publishing an unsigned Salon review in the Revue suisse. In
it Fromentin generally praises academic values and condemns the Orientalist genre, rehearsing pas-
sages from his own Sahel (a book he names).51

28 Orient or France?

Les maîtres d’autrefois proved a flashpoint for further debate. A lengthy promenade through the
museums of Belgium and Holland, it is written with a sense of the relevance of the old masters to
issues of debate in recent French art. Fromentin’s chapter on how Dutch art influenced modern French
landscape contains a little-known but significant text on exoticism. In it Fromentin o¤ers fresh soci-
ological insights into why people adventure beyond Europe, citing “a need to break free proper to
all people crowded in one spot.” He also recognizes the impact of scientific research and the useful-
ness of expeditions to remote parts of the globe. But the result, he concludes in an almost shocking
recantation, “is a cosmopolitan painting, novel rather than original, not very French, which in our
history (if history bothers with it) will represent only a moment of curiosity, of uncertainty, of malaise.
To be frank, it is only a change of air tried out by people in poor health.”52

There is thus a bizarre discursive concurrence between Fromentin the critic and the realists of
1876, at least regarding Orientalism. But Fromentin’s negative view of the contemporary avant-garde
provoked the ire of two pro-realist critics, Louis Duranty, in his famous pamphlet La nouvelle pein-
ture, and Emile Zola in a Salon review.53 Neither could forgive the older writer’s broadsides against
“the new painting,” that is, art of both realist and impressionist complexion, from Courbet to Manet
and Monet. Although Fromentin acknowledged the gifts of visual acuity and sensibility among such
artists, he contested the impersonal and literal nature of their representations and the excessive bright-
ness and crudity of their color, writing famously, “Open air, di¤used light, and real sunshine have
today assumed greater importance in painting than ever before, which, quite frankly, they do not
deserve. . . . Painting today is never bright enough, never sharp enough, never explicit enough, never
crude enough.”54 Fromentin instead defended the chiaroscuro and moody bituminous color used by
the romantics (and before them the Dutch) as the best vehicles for expressive temperament.

Irritated by those words, Duranty attacks their author, dangerously influential, he claims, among
students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts: “This same person—who believes that the faithful depiction
of the costumes, faces, and customs of our contemporaries is a mark of mediocrity—devotes his
own e¤orts to depicting the costumes, faces, and customs of—whom? Contemporary Arabs. Why does
he persist in hindering the colonization of Algeria? No one knows. And why should contemporary
Arabs seem to him the only ones worthy of the preoccupation of the painter? Indeed, no one knows
that either.”55 Duranty’s acid remark on Fromentin’s “hindering the colonization of Algeria” can
only mean that by picturing the Arabs in their apparently uncolonized state, as lords of the open plains,
Fromentin denies the actual French presence and works against French policies of assimilation. In
1876 those policies included the expropriation of Arab and Berber land, the introduction of French
education, bans on the rights of the indigenous to bear arms, to vote, and so on. The liberalizing
promises (including the possibility of greater self-determination) o¤ered to the indigenous during
Napoléon III’s voyage of enquiry through Algeria in 1865 had come to naught. Instead, following
the deadly famines of the late 1860s and the disturbances of the Franco-Prussian War, the Kabyle In-

Orient or France? 29

figure 10
Gustave Guillaumet,

Weaving Women at
Bou-Saâda, oil on

canvas, ca. 1885.

surrection of 1871 reversed such prospects. A stronger alliance between military, Catholic, and com-
mercial colonial interests in Algeria meant the tightening of the colonial fist throughout Algeria.56
Strangely for a leftist, Duranty appears to approve the colonization of Algeria; it is not clear, how-
ever, whether Fromentin’s heroizing of the Arabs in their precolonial state would have helped or
hindered the Arab cause, if indeed it had any e¤ect at all.57

Duranty develops his case against Fromentin by allying him with the symbolist Gustave Moreau
(the artist’s close friend), claiming that together they propagate a strange system of painting, “lim-
ited in the south by Algeria, in the east by mythology, in the west by ancient history . . . the confused
painting of an era of criticism, curio-hunting, and pastiche.” In an ironic passage Duranty denounces
such painting as the ridiculous outcome of studio painting practices:

They fraternize with the chaouchs [Algerian servants] and biskris; they have taken
their black-bearded model down from his studio platform and stuck him on a camel
before the Portail de Gaillon. They have cloaked him in a woollen bedspread bor-
rowed from the butcher next door because this fraternizing with Arabs has made
them blood-thirsty. Finally, they have added the secar la cabeza of the sabir [Algerian
working-class dialect] jargon of the swarthy natives in the province of Oran to their
Italian vocabulary brought back from Rome.58

30 Orient or France?

The passage is as notable for its contemptuous references to indigenous Algerians as for its scathing
comments on any painter who dresses and poses models, rather than simply observes the daily life
of French people in their work or their domestic environment (Edgar Degas was Duranty’s favorite
artist).59 Echoing the arguments for a patriotic geography that would ban exoticism altogether, Du-
ranty (perhaps inadvertently) showered Algerians themselves with contempt and managed to voice
support for the French colonial e¤ort at the same time—hardly a pleasing posture for one of the
early apostles of modern art.

Despite the rain of criticism that seemed to fall upon Orientalism in the year 1876, in painting it
did not die. Castagnary, Duranty, Zola, and even Fromentin himself proved wrong in their dire prog-
nostications. While Orientalism may have been quiescent over the next decade (except in Guillaumet’s
notable work in oasis towns [Fig. 10] and Renoir’s trips to Algiers), by the late 1880s a new genera-
tion of vigorous Orientalists had come into view. There are reasons for the ultimate failure of the
realist critique. The first is that (unlike Gautier, Baudelaire, and Fromentin) its exegetes did not cor-
rectly read the public psychology that pushed French artists to travel abroad. The second is that the
energy of French colonial expansion greatly increased as the century advanced, with attendant pro-
pagandist machinery (including the Universal Expositions of 1889 and 1900) that will be discussed
in later chapters. The further breakdown in the Rome School’s dominance of academic aesthetics
meant that during the 1880s exoticism was promoted through the vehicle of state-funded traveling
scholarships. And in the end there were flaws in the logic of Castagnary’s position: the nationalist
argument to which he appealed could be inverted, for example, by writers of the 1890s like Léonce
Bénédite, who claimed colonial painting as a patriotic mission to establish the glory of “greater
France.” More profoundly, Castagnary’s points about the cultural ken of the French public and the
need to “verify” painting assume that desires, the imagined, and the unfamiliar have no place in the
consumption of art.

Orient or France? 31



2 Renoir and Impressionist
Orientalism

Renoir in Algeria
In spite of the ban on trips abroad that realism gravely declared . . .
Orientalist painters are legion today. What is the use of laughable
prohibitions? Shouldn’t everyone be given the liberty to wander as they
please, wherever their vocation calls them, and doesn’t the artist, if he
has any originality, remain himself before all horizons, in every clime?
– r o ge r m a r x , “The Salons of 1895,” part 4, Gazette des Beaux-Arts
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s little-known Orientalist venture is the perfect embodiment of the attitude
Roger Marx expresses in the epigraph to this section, proof of the modernist idea that temperament
supervenes in the interpreting of local conditions. Marx, a symbolist critic, supporter of Gauguin,
and former realist, argued that if temperament was innate and portable, it could be applied in exotic
climes as well as any others.1 Gauguin is the best-known exponent of such exoticism among the fin-
de-siècle avant-garde, but Renoir preceded him, albeit on a more comfortable and modest scale.

Generally Renoir seems disconnected from Orientalism. Hardly an exoticist, he is feted rather for

33

his paintings of the French countryside and French women. It would be fair to presume a gulf be-
tween the impressionist avant-garde, with its leftish commitment to the painting of modern life and
experimental techniques, and academic painters, whether toughened adventurers wooed by the ethno-
graphic scene in far countries or armchair travelers concocting dubious fantasies at home, who prac-
ticed a conservative Orientalism. Thus Paul Cézanne ’s comment on Félix Ziem’s lack of attachment
to any homeland: “Now there ’s another who was not born anywhere particular. All these buggers
who go to the Orient, to Venice, to Algeria, in search of the sun, don’t they have houses on the fields
of their fathers?”2

Renoir, heedless of such peer-group admonitions, obeying a desire to emulate Delacroix (and re-
cover from pneumonia), made two painting trips to Algeria, in 1881 and 1882. Some two dozen can-
vases, not well known but some of them very fine, were the result. Devotees of Orientalism like
Léonce Bénédite, who began to reorganize and revitalize the movement around 1890, lost no time in
claiming Renoir as one of their own and exhibiting his Algerian works. It is their authority that en-
titles me to call Renoir an Orientalist. The first section of this chapter assesses Renoir’s Algerian paint-
ings and the second fleshes out perturbations in the history of modernism that occur if one crosses
Orientalism with the question of style history.

Renoir’s paradoxical Orientalism had two phases, which correspond to the division between stu-
dio works painted in France and works inspired by observation in a colonial setting. Renoir was
adept at both, although the colonial works are the focus here.3 In 1875, when the anti-Orientalist
tide was in full flood, Renoir turned from his subjects of Parisian contemporary life to paint an ex-
act copy of Delacroix’s Orientalist masterpiece of 1841, The Jewish Wedding (La noce juive, Fig.
11). Part fulfillment of a commission for the industrialist Jean Dollfuss and part act of homage,
Renoir’s copy followed the works of sumptuous studio Orientalism he had executed around 1870
in a distinctly Delacroxian vein: the famous Odalisque (National Gallery of Art, Washington), the
Madame Stora in Algerian Costume (Mme Stora en costume algérienne, Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco), and Parisians in Algerian Costume (Parisiennes en costume algérienne, National Museum
of Western Art, Tokyo), which even then must have seemed a pastiche of Delacroix’s great Women
of Algiers (Femmes d’Alger) of 1834.

The term “pastiche” is appropriate here: Renoir seems to have been acutely aware of the mas-
querades of studio Orientalism, in which costumed Europeans often substituted for Eastern men and
women. Delacroix had used such models in making his Women of Algiers, which reconstructed a scene
he had witnessed in Algiers shortly before. Renoir, however, who had not yet traveled to the East,
emphasizes that his models are Parisians, and thus his work could be seen as naturalist demytholo-
gizing of the Orientalist genre. That is not the case with the Jewish Wedding copy, which shows Renoir
in the grip of art-historical memory and exoticist yearnings, thus calling into question images of him
as a doctrinaire impressionist workman, painting the countryside and people of France.

34 Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

figure 11
Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Copy after Delacroix’s
“Jewish Wedding,” oil
on canvas, 1875.

In fact impressionism was by no means innocent of the exotic. Claude Monet, after the first year
of his painting studies in Paris, allowed himself to be drafted into military service and chose to travel
to Algeria, where he spent seventeen months in the fashionable regiment of the Chasseurs d’Afrique.
In 1900 he recalled:

Nothing had attracted me so much as the endless cavalcades under the burning sun,
the razzias [raids], the crackling of gunpowder, the saber thrusts, the nights in the
desert under a tent. . . . I succeeded, by personal insistence, in being drafted into an
African regiment. . . . In Algeria I spent two [sic] really charming years. . . . In my
moments of leisure I attempted to render what I saw. You cannot imagine . . . how
much my vision gained thereby. . . . The impressions of light and color that I received
there were not to classify themselves until later, but they contained the germ of my
future researches.4

Monet’s preconception of military adventure reads like a page out of Vernet or Delacroix. After just
a year of service an attack of typhoid fever sent him back to convalesce in Le Havre, where his fam-

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism 35

ily agreed to buy him out of the regiment. He returned to his promising career as a painter. Noth-
ing remains of the works Monet recalled making in Algeria, even if, as he told a journalist in 1889,
they were numerous and directly presaged some of the techniques of his impressionism.5 But I will
return in the course of my argument to his claim that his impressionist techniques were in fact pred-
icated on North African light.

No doubt Monet’s memories of Africa helped prompt his friend Renoir’s two trips to Algiers, for
a month in February 1881 and two months in spring 1882. Renoir’s biographers agree that he was in
crisis about the direction of his art when he traveled to the Côte d’Azur, Italy, and Algeria. His dis-
covery of the Mediterranean prompted Monet’s subsequent return, which led to his series of garden
paintings of Bordighera in 1884. I am less interested in the art-historical “crisis of impressionism”
than in the patterns of travel disclosed by Renoir’s Algerian trips, which were comparable to those
of British and American painters beginning to journey in greater numbers to Algeria, often after so-
journs in France. Algiers was the obvious destination: the Islamic sultanate of Morocco was o¤-lim-
its (apart from the international port of Tangier), and Tunisia did not become a French protectorate
until 1881. Renoir’s travels had a therapeutic aspect as well as a seasonal logic. Undertaking a budget
Grand Tour, Renoir, like a good tourist, was e¤ectively engaging in winter tourism in Algeria (to
translate the French term hivernage). He did so partly to recover from pneumonia—a common pathol-
ogy for travel to the Orient. The idea and itinerary are encapsulated in the title of a book by an Amer-
ican congressman, Samuel Cox: Search for Winter Sunbeams in the Riviera, Corsica, Algiers, and Spain,
of 1868. Such a search relied on the new steamship and rail technology that Gautier had vaunted as
delivering new subjects for painting. One may fairly characterize Renoir and a host of fellow artist
tourists as peintres d’escale, to adapt the term littérature d’escale, or “port-of-call” literature.6 Renoir
was an artist of the stopover. But it is surprising how much good painting he was able to produce
during his brief stays in Algeria.

He visited Algeria some fifty years after the French wars of conquest had begun, and in the tem-
perate north the infrastructure of a modern state—roads, railways, ports—was being imposed on
the country. Since the insurrection of 1871, French laws had forced Kabyle farmers o¤ their land and
broken up the old system of Arab land tenure. The French were energetically cultivating crops like
the grapevine that had no place in the Islamic economy. For two generations the colonists had been
knocking down sections of Algerian towns and building in the European (but not yet the Moorish)
manner. The process was especially advanced in the capital Algiers, where, except for the hillside
precinct of the Casbah, much of the original town and the waterfront had been remodeled, as Gau-
tier had lamented, in imitation of the arcades and apartment blocks of the Rue de Rivoli.

The “exotic” was thus retreating in Algeria, where many thousands of French and other Euro-
pean colonists lived, where their language and their money were accepted, where the police and the
army provided security. Hardier travelers could chase the exotic south by train and stagecoach to oa-

36 Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

sis resorts like Biskra (where Gustave Guillaumet and Charles Landelle painted in the 1870s and 1880s),
or they could, like Renoir, seek it out in the easy environs of Algiers itself.

The best-known of Renoir’s Algerine cityscapes is Arab Festival, Algiers: The Casbah (Fête arabe,
Alger: La Casbah). Exhibited at the Society of French Orientalist Painters in 1895 as La mosquée à
Alger and described as “a picturesque milling of Arab multitudes on uneven ground,”7 it was pur-
chased by Claude Monet in 1900. The occasion Renoir painted, never firmly identified, is a per-
formance by North African musicians (like those painted previously by Delacroix, Fromentin, and
Alfred Dehodencq). In the center of the canvas a ring of five male dancers in turbans and red caps
play tambourines and flutes before a large crowd. Such musicians were often hired to help celebrate
parties and some religious feasts. Local men, women, and even children are scattered across the nat-
ural amphitheater formed by the raw earth of the heights behind the Casbah—identifiable as the
crumbling Turkish ramparts (today built over) above the Jardin Marengo and the Bab el Oued quar-
ter of Algiers. Indigenous people mingle with a small number of European observers suggested by
black suits, hats, and occasional women’s bonnets. Below this terrain vague, the corner of bleached
domes and cubes appears to depict the precinct of the Mosque of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman looking down
to the blue sea. Thus the ancient buildings of “Algiers the White” help anchor this unconventional
composition.

Renoir probably considered the North African spectacle as a characteristic problem of pictorial
Orientalism: how to render the light and color of the exotic site. If so, he was true to the tradition of
Delacroix’s painting and of Fromentin’s travel books. His son Jean, recalling that Renoir “discov-
ered the value of white in Algeria,” quotes him as saying, “Everything is white: the burnous they
wear, the walls, the minarets, the road. . . . And against it, the green of the orange trees and the grey
of the fig trees.”8 In that comment everything betokens the problem of the palette—the Algerian
locals matter most for the white they wear. In short, the colonial traveler, enjoying the fruits of his
country’s dominance, aestheticizes the colonized people, treats them as spectacle. That attitude re-
turns us to Monet’s construction of Algeria as a site of visual revelation and, still earlier, to Fro-
mentin’s description of the Orient as a site of “unclassifiable” experiences. Fromentin believed that
his canvases rarely met the challenge of painting such experiences, and neither perhaps did those of
Renoir, who preferred the temperate Mediterranean zone in and around Algiers. In about 1880 Al-
giers boasted numerous sites where foreign landscapists could set up their easels to paint outdoors
with little risk of interference, provided they observed propriety and the view, rather than the figure,
was their subject (as Fromentin had recommended).

Moorish architecture held great attraction for Renoir. Mosque at Algiers (Mosquée à Alger; see Plate
3) was painted on his second trip. Many of the traditionally garbed figures (with the exception of a
wealthy-looking woman in a head-to-foot haik) are rendered wraithlike before the solidity of
bleached Moorish architectural forms. Renoir’s picture shows one of the most venerated of all Al-

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism 37

figure 12
The Mosque of Sidi
Abd-er-Rahman, Algiers,

ca. 1929.

giers mosques, a seventeenth-century structure that houses the remains of the theologian Sidi Abd-
er-Rahman Et Tsalibi (1347–1471), the popular patron saint of Algiers, for whom it is named.9 It still
stands prominent today among the buildings of the upper Casbah (Fig. 12). Renoir’s picture, accu-
rate in many of its details, partly obscures the antique tombstones among which Algerian women
and children came to talk and socialize. The site was one favored by French painters, photographers,
and (after 1904) publishers of picture postcards. Renoir is typical in giving no sense of its proximity
to the bustling modernity of the Algiers port. After 1904 the crenelated ramparts visible at the up-
per left of Renoir’s skyline would be replaced by the new French-built medersa (a theological col-
lege), designed in the Moorish style.

38 Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

figure 13
Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Stairway in Algiers,oil
on canvas, 1882.

A charcoal study of this mosque by Renoir’s impressionist predecessor Albert Lebourg reveals
what is antipicturesque in Renoir’s treatment: unlike Lebourg or, later, photographers, he truncates
the square tower of the minaret with its short flagpole,10 making the composition more compact and
allowing focus (if that is the word, given Renoir’s impressionistic imprecision) on elements like the
bands of colored ceramic tiles on the minaret and window frames. The colors, from the rich greens
of the vegetation to explosions of yellow sunlight across the building’s white walls, have an inten-
sity unmatched in any previous Orientalist painting.

Renoir painted his second architectural view, the Stairway in Algiers (Escalier à Alger, Fig. 13),
elsewhere in the precinct of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman. The curious composition, looking straight up a

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism 39

figure 14
Albert Lebourg, Algiers Street,

oil on canvas, ca. 1876.

long stone staircase to the facade and dome on the right, adapts Dutch picturesque devices, like the
perspective along an avenue of trees, to an exotic situation. Renoir, in defining an aspect of the Al-
giers experience as a vertiginous optic, the view that plunges up or down, concurred with the pho-
tographers and painters of the day who similarly recorded the cramped, stepped streets of the Cas-
bah. Earlier still, some of the first lithographers visiting Algiers had transcribed views from the heights
of Casbah terraces, out across the rooftops to the distant port below. Renoir, like them, provides a
local sta¤age: an implausible mother-and-child group, and several burnous-clad men, boys, and al-
ley cats sheltering, like Fromentin’s “cadavers,” in the shadows on the stairs.

Renoir’s inclusion of the Algerian populace in his architectural scenes di¤ers from the practice of
Lebourg, who spent the years 1872– 76 in the city as drawing master at the Société des Beaux-Arts.
Most of Lebourg’s small oil paintings study streets of the old Turkish quarter and port of Algiers.
They are almost universally unpeopled, as if the crumbling, bleached walls were enough of a sub-

40 Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

ject in themselves (Fig. 14). Roger Marx was later to remark on “the intensity of luminous vibra-
tions, the limpidity of the air, the transparency of shadows” in Lebourg’s painted études, “whose
technique . . . inaugurates new directions in the representation of the lands of the East.”11

Lebourg precedes Renoir in importing a modernist vision into North African painting, not only
in time, but also in the abstracting e¤ect of his brushwork. In Port of Algiers (Port d’Alger; see Fig. 18)
the vigorous blocking of the architectural elements and the animated strokes on the water are com-
parable to those in the toughest impressionist landscapes. Lebourg was also modernist in his use,
more than a decade before Monet, of the loose series as a structure for visual research. What held
back Lebourg was his palette: his Algiers views were tonal compositions, extensions of earlier land-
scape traditions. Hence his exclusion from the ranks of canonical impressionists—Camille Pissarro,
for example, criticized Lebourg’s later French landscapes as “black.”12 Renoir, in contrast, brought
a new coloristic intensity to the North African scene with his already well established blond, high-
color palette. Jean Alazard (author of the first major history of Orientalism) recognized that: “He
looks at the Jardin d’Essai and the Moulin de la Galette with the same eyes, sensing vivid impres-
sions and immediately crystallizing them in color. . . . One must recognize that the scale of his col-
ors is the same in Algiers as in Paris; he did not modify it. . . . He [understood] the Mediterranean
rather than the Oriental element in the atmosphere and sky of Algiers.”13

It was precisely the atmosphere and human spectacle of this Mediterranean zone that Fromentin
had evoked in his book centered on Algiers, A Year in the Sahel. Reprinted with his Summer in the
Sahara in 1874, that text may have encouraged Renoir to visit Algiers and directed him to the nearby
hamlet of Mustapha, where Fromentin had had his lodgings. The verdant crescent of the Bay of Al-
giers went well beyond the city, where the French now occupied the elegant Moorish villas built by
rais (corsair captains) under the Ottoman Regency. Renoir lodged in the center of town, at the Rue
de la Marine (with its cafés and bistros) next to the port. But he painted out at Mustapha, describing
the landscape in this letter to a patron: “You ought to see this Mitidja Plain at the gates of Algiers. I
have never seen anything more sumptuous and more fertile. At this moment they are planting vines
with such frenzy that it looks as though they are doing it for the arrival of a king, as though to say,
‘Look how my people work.’ . . . Normandy is poor by comparison.”14 Renoir’s letter is remarkable
for the completely positive light in which he sees the colonial process. He encapsulates the sense of
possession, of both the land and the labor of the indigenous, in his image of a visiting sovereign with
power over all he surveys. Like other Frenchmen, Renoir was proud of this richest province of what
was called l’Afrique française, where imported Australian eucalypti were proving a success along-
side the vineyards. Renoir added, “The farmers here are making enormous fortunes, the properties
are increasing in value, and in ten years Algiers will certainly be the most beautiful city in the world.”
On the contrary, within a decade artist visitors were fleeing Algiers for the interior, likening it to a
noisy and polluted industrial suburb of Paris.

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism 41

Renoir was particularly interested in the subtropical vegetation that grew in profusion in the Mediter-
ranean zone of North Africa. In the Orientalist iconography, plants like the palm tree become arche-
typal markers of the exotic, even when abstracted from their desert oasis habitat. In fact, much of the
plant life of the Mitidja was introduced rather than native, including the banana trees that appear in
Renoir’s Field of Banana Trees (Champ de bananiers; Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Congressman Cox, a keen
amateur botanist, evokes Renoir’s subject in describing a day trip from Algiers: “an . . . excursion . . .
into the hills and among the vegetable wonders and beauties which surround the city. . . . Lining the
roads in the meadows are orchards of bananas. In fact, the banana is a great crop here.”15 In Renoir’s
canvas—one of two Algerian pictures he chose to exhibit at the 1882 impressionist exhibition—the
vigorous banana palms form an allover screen of variegated fronds. Renoir nonetheless carefully lo-
cated this compositionally daring scene, with the Mustapha hillside and the city glowing white in the
distance.

It is likely that Renoir did this painting in the Jardin d’Essai (an experimental garden), the only
Algerian site he returned to repeatedly, painting a suite of striking pictures. Founded soon after the
1830 invasion, Cox explains, it was “somewhat after the manner of similar gardens at London and
Washington, for the collection and acclimatization of all the rare grains, plants, trees, fruits, and flow-
ers.”16 The fascination of the famous botanical garden consisted in this variety of specimens grown
to maximum proportions, an exotic picturesque.

Renoir’s Jardin d’Essai in Algiers (Le Jardin d’Essai, Alger; see Plate 4) depicts one of the avenues
in which dragon palms alternate with tall palms. As with Field of Banana Trees, Renoir experimented
in turning over most of the picture space to the spiky, vigorous foliage itself. He assumed the van-
tage point of a casual stroller looking down a deep perspective of trees, almost shutting out the sky
with the canopy of palms, like Corot or Monet in the woods of the Ile-de-France. Here the fronds,
seen overhead against the sunlight, make patterns of striated shadows on the path. When Renoir ex-
hibited the work in 1882, the cartoonist Draner (Jules Renard) lampooned it in a thumbnail sketch
of feather dusters, to which he gave the punning (and untranslatable) caption “Un jardin qui a ses
plumeaux par un peintre qui a son plumet.”17

Moorish buildings could also be motifs in the garden’s picturesque ensemble, as in another work,
the more pastoral Jardin d’Essai at Algiers ( Jardin d’Essai à Alger; private collection), comparable
to Monet’s later Bordighera palm gardens. In both Monet and Renoir the Mediterranean appears as
a zone where Africa and the Riviera interpenetrate—in the quality of their light and in their vege-
tation. The Jardin d’Essai, where extraordinary plants were ordered by the controlling lines of French
formal gardening, remained a favorite site for twentieth-century painters; its connection to the aes-
thetics of exoticism was cemented by the establishment nearby of the studios of the Villa Abd-el-Tif
in 1907 and the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers in 1930.

In considering Renoir’s figure painting, it is useful to recall that the Orientalist enterprise is fun-

42 Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

damentally informed by di¤erences of power between the indigenous and settlers or tourists, who
usually presume that their presence provides a right to carry on cultural operations with little heed
to violence that may be done to the cultural priorities of the indigenous. There is evidence of that
presumption in Renoir’s figure paintings and his commentaries on them. On the brief first trip to
“this beautiful country” he wrote to a friend: “The women so far are unapproachable; I don’t un-
derstand their jabber [ baragouin] and they are very fickle [très lâcheuses]. I’m scared to death of start-
ing something again and not finishing it. It’s too bad, there are some pretty ones but they don’t want
to pose.”18

The reluctance to pose is understandable: it contravened the Islamic convention against picturing
people or animals in the plastic arts that applied broadly in the Maghreb at the time, and it violated
the laws of propriety that forbade a woman to appear in public without her veil. That obstacle, en-
demic to Orientalist painting, may explain why some of Renoir’s Algerian figures are no more than
sketches, hasty impressions of people caught unawares or seen at a distance. Renoir’s letters suggest
that it was not for want of trying that he painted rather little in Algiers. He wrote to Durand-Ruel:
“Here I am, more or less settled in Algiers and negotiating with some Arab [men] to find models,
which is not easy, since it’s a question of who is the trickiest [qui trompera le plus]. But I hope that this
time I will manage to bring you back some figures. . . . I’ve seen some incredibly picturesque chil-
dren. Will I get them? I’ll do whatever is needed for it.”19 Part of the problem of models was finan-
cial: although a few were available, Renoir could not match what the many wealthier traveling artists
paid them: “The figure, even in Algiers, is getting more and more difficult to obtain. If only you
knew how many bad painters there are here. It’s insane, and especially some Englishmen who spoil
the few available women. C’est insupportable! ”20

One way Renoir could get around the intercultural and colonial obstacle was to dress European
sitters in Eastern costume, a time-honored expedient of Orientalists from the eighteenth-century Swiss
artist Jean-Etienne Liotard on. For one such cross-cultural masquerade Renoir dressed the ten-year-
old daughter of Louis Fourcaud, a Parisian art writer and journalist, in a specially purchased cos-
tume and produced an admittedly saccharine study of her head and bust.

He employed the same procedure in the most appealing and elaborate of all his Algerian figure
paintings, recently retitled Mademoiselle Fleury in Algerian Costume (formerly Jeune fille au faucon,
Fig. 15). Recalling his second trip to Algeria, the artist told Ambroise Vollard: “I caught the inevitable
cold in my chest at L’Estaque, which decided me to take a second trip to Algeria. There I made a life-
size portrait of a young girl named Mlle Fleury, dressed in Algerian costume, in an Arab house, hold-
ing a bird.”21 Mlle Fleury may have been related to General Fleury of the Armée d’Afrique. (Renoir
certainly had a growing reputation as a portraitist to the metropolitan haute bourgeoisie.) The un-
likely addition of the flapping European kestrel was very likely provided to satisfy public expecta-
tions of Orientalist imagery, as MaryAnne Stevens suggests. The seductive passages of painting—as

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism 43

figure 15
Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Mademoiselle Fleury in
Algerian Costume, oil on

canvas, 1882.

44

in the girl’s costume with its froth of cream chi¤ons, orange silks, and diaphanous embroidered golds
established by a layering of translucent glazes—are appealing, but it is difficult to fix the iconogra-
phy of the image. It appears to be an elaborate studio portrait, yet according to the artist was painted
“in an Arab house.” Although there are red-haired, fair-skinned Kabyles in Algeria, Renoir’s assur-
ance that the model was European casts the whole image as a conceit of cultural cross-dressing, a
play on the genre of Orientalism reminiscent of his 1872 Parisians in Algerian Costume.

A similar undecidability is apparent in four or five other studio portraits whose titles proclaim them
studies of indigenous Algerian females. If the sitter in the Algerian Girl (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
was not French, she may have been from the Jewish community or of Berber or Arab background
without Renoir’s having managed to characterize her as such; instead, he assimilated her to the peaches-
and-cream complexion and chubby physiognomy he used for Parisiennes, simply darkening her eye-
brows and hair a little. Ethnic identity is fluid, and in Renoir’s studio portraiture neither looks nor dress
can firmly establish it. If most Orientalists fix on markers of identity with a numbing stereotypy, Renoir
treated them as singularly inexact. His approach might almost be called anti-ethnographic.

One could consider the lack of ethnic fixity an allegory of the heterogeneity, if not “hybridity,”
of the population of Algiers. Renoir’s Algiers paintings metaphorically embody the emerging mix
of the many ethnicities populating Algiers in the 1880s. In late-nineteenth-century French racialist
theory, there was even a name for a specific new Latin people that was to repopulate the colony, the
néo-Français. It was to be a race born of Mediterranean settler stock—Provençals, Italians, Maltese,
Corsicans, Spanish, and northern French—who would combine physical vigor and bodily perfec-
tion with an aptitude for work and a firm moral sense. Those qualities would di¤erentiate them from
the indigenous, so often seen in settler texts as indolent and unreliable; thus the néo-Francais was not
to be based on intermarriage with indigenous people such as the Kabyles, Turks, or Kouloughlis who
inhabited Algiers.22 To the extent that Renoir’s pictures embrace notions of indigeneity, they also
escape any such systematic racialist program.

In a clutch of minor works Renoir attempted to seize the human image on the streets of Algiers
with an apparent openness to the diversity of the inhabitants. His future collaborator the painter Al-
bert André evoked Algiers’ “streets, in the shade of which he made friends with the working-class
women and children. He lived with them, looked at them through his own eyes, and did not paint
them en orientaliste.”23 André, though idealizing, gives a sense of what Renoir may have hoped to
achieve in this series. The key to it is given by two surviving sheets of indigenous heads and figures
(the better-known sheet was presented to the Algiers museum by Durand-Ruel in 1930; Fig. 16). In
it the peripheral heads of young women in haiks and sketchy busts of babies are reunited in a cen-
tral Raphaelesque maternity group, but with an exotic or biblical inflection. The second sheet clarifies
Renoir’s working method on the streets of Algiers, as sketches of a mother-child pair resulted in a
more complete Algerian Woman and Child (Algérienne et son enfant; Collection Samir Traboulsi,

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism 45

figure 16
Pierre-Auguste Renoir,

Algerian Figures, oil
on canvas, 1882.

Geneva). Scaling up from sketch to small “tableau” and adding a grassy backdrop, Renoir was at-
tentive to the ethnic marker of dark complexion, even the suggestion of a Berber tattoo between the
eyebrows of the mother. The unadorned costumes serve as a sartorial indicator of class. Once again,
this woman’s blurred features suggest that Renoir was unable to approach her closely.

Character and accuracy are more evident in the small Ali, the Young Arab (Ali, le jeune Arabe; Col-
lection Mrs. Sidney Brody, Los Angeles), its subject described by Jean Alazard as a “nonchalant
yaouled (street urchin)” with a “mocking smile.”24 Renoir studied the face of the boy ( yaouled is a
derogatory Arabic word for “boy”), a member of a class that dealt freely with the French and would
pose for ready cash, first in a small sketch and then in a full-length version, a work surprisingly fine
in such details as the boy’s slim brown feet beneath his billowing pantaloons. He is the only male
painted as an individual in the Algerian series except in the surprising Arab on a Camel (Arabe au cha-
meau; location unknown), showing a barefoot Bedouin on a dromedary painted with a skill to put
most professional Orientalists to shame.

46 Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

figure 17
Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Old Arab Woman, oil
on canvas, 1882.

The figure in only one painting by Renoir seems devoid of idealization: his Old Arab Woman
(Vieille femme arabe, Fig. 17), which exists in both a sketch and a final version. This older woman
must have agreed to pose long enough for Renoir to study her features and bearing with care. The
portrait seems sympathetic to the sitter and projects psychological depth. According to Jean Renoir,
his highly class-conscious father was often contemptuous of the wealthy. (“Being a beggar is no dis-
grace, but buying or selling shares in the Suez Canal Company is,” he said.) In Algiers Renoir was

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism 47

struck by a “feeling of equality among Moslems” that he attributed to their membership in a single
religious group: “On several occasions he had noticed a well-to-do Moslem talking with a ragged in-
dividual. ‘Harun-el-Rashid conversing with a beggar: he knows that in the sight of Allah he is not a
bit more important.’”25

That comment and this painting go beyond the socialist sympathies of French naturalist writers
and painters to interpret the mentality of people from other cultures, with di¤erent beliefs. But Renoir,
unlike Paul Leroy or Etienne Dinet, never proceeded far with that project. With two brief trips—a
stay totaling three months—Renoir never pretended to that achievement. He remained a peintre
d’escale. Here are the limits of his Orientalism: for him, as for many other French artists, it was a
temporary enrichment of his field of action rather than a permanent commitment. As Alazard said,
once Renoir had left Algeria, he reverted to French subjects. The actuality of the Orient purged him
of the earlier studio imaginings Delacroix had inspired, and he returned to the subjects prescribed
by the anti-Orientalist critics of the 1870s: the French nation, contemporary French life. In one bright
burst of Oriental pictures Renoir had embraced the freedom to travel espoused by critics from Gau-
tier to Roger Marx. But he remained a naturalist of immediate horizons, requiring the model before
him to make sense of the task of painting.

Impressionism/Orientalism: Criticism and the Problem of Light

The Orient . . . inverts everything. . . . It is the land par excellence
of grand vanishing lines, of the bright and the immobile, of inflamed
landscapes under a blue sky, that is to say, brighter than the sky, which
constantly leads . . . to reversed paintings: no center, because light flows
all around; no moving shadows, because the sky is cloudless.
– e uge` n e f r o m e n t i n , Une année dans le Sahel, 1859

Fromentin was the most articulate nineteenth-century artist to comment on problems of light and
color, the key aesthetic challenge raised by painting the Orient and a visual preoccupation that con-
tinues to this day. It remains a platitude that travelers across the latitudes, and even travelers between
neighboring countries, seek to define what is special about the light and color of the places they visit.
It would be pointless to deny the experiential di¤erences such travelers notice—physical conditions
like the position of the sun in di¤erent latitudes and hemispheres or the humidity in the atmosphere
of the desert as against that of riverine or maritime locations may indeed induce measurably di¤er-
ent perceptions of light and color.

An awareness of such di¤erences in the discourses of exploration, travel, and painting is never-

48 Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

theless historically specific to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment texts.26 On the one hand, the
problematic of light and color is a specifically pictorial matter, posed by those who measure their lo-
cal experiences of making a watercolor or oil painting (or even a photograph) against a similar ex-
perience in an exotic locale: it is a function of the “picturesque.” On the other hand, invoking this
problematic is a way to classify new experiences, to say something about a climate encountered for
the first time. As such it bears the unmistakable imprint of the empirical sciences of the late eigh-
teenth and the nineteenth century and the mode of aesthetic description called naturalism. As I ar-
gued in the case of Renoir, it is at the heart of the colonizing aesthetic because the preoccupation
with light and color is a signal way to address colonized places without referring to the situation of
the inhabitants, to the political actuality that has made possible the observer’s or artist’s presence.
That is, the light-color problematic is a key element in the depersonalized aestheticizing of the Ori-
ent. For many artists from Fromentin to Matisse, the problem of painting the East was to discover
how to represent a place resistant to representation because it lies outside the bounds of the normally
picturable.

As criticism and theory developed around impressionist painting, analyses of perceptions of light
and color and their translation in the medium of paint attained a new sophistication. The inclusion of
Algerian pictures in three of the eight impressionist exhibitions held in Paris between 1874 and 1886
can serve to open this analysis of the crossover between impressionism and Orientalism. The key player
was not Renoir, who showed just two Algerian pictures in 1882, but Lebourg, whose display of two
groups of Algerian canvases in 1879 and 1880 made his reputation.27 Jean de Tarade was all enthusi-
asm for them: “The air circulates in waves through his landscapes, his seascapes; the color is trans-
parent, the tones fine and delicate, [although] some of them are brushed in a very violent fashion.”28

Lebourg communicated sensations of light and color by focusing on the visual ensemble rather
than the details of the exotic scene. His free technique caused complaints in 1880, one critic calling
his Algiers Admiralty (Amirauté d’Alger) “crazy painting,” another lampooning his little strokes of
uniform dimensions as parquetry, not painting.29 (Figure 18, while not the picture exhibited in the
group show, is comparable.) Yet the dominant view was that these works were more solid than those
by the big impressionist names. Most writers ignored Lebourg’s Orientalist subject matter (and con-
tradictions between realism and colonial exoticism) to focus on impressionist technical questions.
Renoir’s initial showings of Algerian canvases at the 1882 impressionist exhibition had a similar re-
ception. Overshadowed in a large consignment of pictures that included the already celebrated Lun-
cheon at Bougival (Un déjeuner à Bougival), Renoir’s Field of Banana Trees and Jardin d’Essai at Al-
giers generated little comment beyond the cartoon by Draner already mentioned,30 and the epithet
“feverish” arising from the painter’s rendering of brilliant sunlight in them.

Only in retrospect, as the historiographical construction of both Orientalism and impressionism
was undertaken toward the turn of the century, could authors like Roger Marx and Léonce Bénédite

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism 49

figure 18 Albert Lebourg, The Port of Algiers, oil on canvas, 1876.

fully debate the role of impressionism in relation to the Orientalist tradition. For Marx, “Our Mediter-
ranean colony stimulated . . . the aspiration of our school toward brightness. Not a single master of
impressionism has dwelled there without profit, Claude Monet first of all, Lebourg soon after, Renoir
more recently. In regard to [Lebourg], Algeria was the veritable midwife of his talent. . . . I know
of no Orientalist for whom the brightening of the palette has been so rapid.”31 Marx considered
Lebourg’s Algerian works more technically evolved than those of his near-contemporaries Re-
gnault or Guillaumet, the abbreviated detail of Lebourg’s studies contrasting with their accumulated
visual facts. But Marx also remarked on Lebourg’s repetition of motifs, in particular the port of Al-
giers. In retrospect such repetition might seem to anticipate the modernist serial practice of Monet’s
Haystacks and Cézanne ’s Mont Ste-Victoires. Marx is sensitive to this issue of repetition, writing
that Lebourg painted “the Admiralty and the navy buildings lapped by cerulean waves . . . many times,
from the same point, in every weather, in the middle of the day, at sunup and sundown. . . . He drew
from a single theme the text of pictures that were similar yet unlike.”32 While Marx’s terminology
bears the imprint of writing on Monet’s series of the 1890s, he does not claim any precedence for
Lebourg in inventing a serial structure.

Not so Léonce Bénédite, from 1892 curator of the Luxembourg Museum in Paris (Fig. 19). Bénédite

50 Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

figure 19
Nadar Studio,
Léonce Bénédite,
ca. 1900.

wished to give Orientalists historical priority over impressionists in investigating light. In a later mono-
graph he asserted the historical significance of Lebourg’s anticipation of Monet’s series.33 Bénédite
even argued that the young émigré artist from Rouen had no prior familiarity with the Parisian im-
pressionists, highlighting instead the role of the Lyonnais Jean Seignemartin in aiding the liberation
of Lebourg’s palette. For Bénédite it was Seignemartin, an aesthetic descendant of Delacroix and an-
other refugee to Algeria for health reasons (he died of pneumonia in 1876), who inspired Lebourg
to throw o¤ the bituminous grounds of academic landscape, “to paint on the virgin canvas and to
apply pure whites. The beautiful sky of Algeria did the rest. The scales fell from his eyes.”34

A rhetorician capable of claiming that the Algerian sky itself modified the history of painting de-
serves closer investigation. In a range of articles on Orientalism written from 1888 on, whether
Bénédite wrote as a salonnier, or reviewer of annual Salons; as the curator of the Luxembourg; or as
the author of catalogue prefaces for the Society of French Orientalist Painters, the problem of light
animates his Orientalist discourse, the most significant compiled in the era. In Bénédite ’s writing im-
pressionism is always contentious: he never fully accepted the movement, and although he recog-
nized its historical importance, he regarded some of its major practitioners as too deliberately mired
in notoriety to be given unqualified credit.

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism 51

Bénédite ’s conflicted attitude is apparent in his handling of the notorious Caillebotte bequest. In
that case the historical importance of the critic-curator, personally in charge of contemporary art ac-
quisitions for the French state for almost thirty years, is evident. The painter and collector Gustave
Caillebotte had made a large gift of impressionist pictures to the French state early in Bénédite’s tenure
as curator of the Luxembourg Museum.35 Initially Bénédite welcomed the gift and showed an intel-
ligent insight into impressionism’s aesthetic goals when he first wrote to announce the bequest in 1894.
By 1897, when the much-reduced gift was finally displayed in the Luxembourg under his auspices,
Bénédite somewhat wearily set out a standard account of “that little school which has made itself the
subject of so much talk.”36 Outside the context of the Caillebotte bequest he published virtually noth-
ing on impressionism, nor did he purchase many further impressionist (let alone postimpressionist)
works for the Luxembourg over the next three decades.

Bénédite ’s texts develop an alternative historiography, giving the Orientalist movement priority
in certain discoveries in the painting of light. Rather than credit the practitioners of impressionism
with chromatic and luminary innovations, as twentieth-century art history customarily does, he
o¤ered an alternative. In it the key figure is Léon Belly, the painter of the Pilgrims Going to Mecca
(Les pélerins se rendant à la Mecque; Musée d’Orsay, Paris). From as early as 1853, Bénédite claimed
in a text on the Caillebotte gift, Belly had “resolved with a singular originality the delicate pictorial
problems of the di¤usion of light, the bleaching of tones.”37 Jean-François Millet and Belly were just
as much technical precursors of the impressionists as Camille Corot and Courbet, he argued, with
Belly the “veritable initiator of the Orientalist school that marched with the impressionists in the ul-
timate development of the scientific and naturalist evolution.”38

The issue is complex, for an impressionist view of how light functions in pictorial art conditions
Bénédite ’s retrospective case. The critic was plainly influenced by the way studio talk and writing
about impressionism had sharpened the language by which phenomena of light and color might be
discussed. Take, for example, a passage on Bénédite ’s favorite Orientalist, Etienne Dinet. In it
Bénédite ’s terms of reference are comparable to those of Théodore Duret, Gustave Ge¤roy, or even
a neo-impressionist critic like Félix Fénéon insistent on scientificity: “[Dinet] pushed to the utmost
degree . . . the observation and notation of luminous phenomena, either in their most intense direct
e¤ects, or in their subtlest indirect action. . . . He tackled . . . the methodical, reasoned—one could
almost say scientific—study of all the great physical questions of lighting the body in space under
the rays of the sun, along with . . . the interposing of the atmosphere, and their corollaries, the bleach-
ing out of tones in the sunlight or the coloration of shadows.”39 Here Bénédite uses certain elements
of an impressionist discourse (colored shadows or indirect light) but not others (the exaltation of the
“fugitive e¤ects” of light). And he claims for Dinet filiation with orthodox predecessors (Théodore
Rousseau and Corot, Charles-François Daubigny and Millet) rather than the impressionists.40

A Fromentinian view of the “exceptional” conditions of vision in the East also runs through

52 Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

Bénédite ’s writing, especially that on Gustave Guillaumet, whom Bénédite credited with an un-
precedented acuity in questions of representation. Like Fromentin, Guillaumet was an artist with the
writer’s skill to record his impressions of Africa in his admirable text Tableaux algériens.41 He spent
long seasons, not, like Belly in the “grayish” light of the Nile Basin, but in the brilliance of Saharan
Algeria.42

There Guillaumet could represent what Bénédite (appropriating the impressionist term) called
the “envelope of beings and things in this palpitating atmosphere that . . . bathes the dryness of lines
as if in an imperceptible and vibrant fluid.”43 One comes nearest to seeing such an “envelope” in
Guillaumet’s early Desert: The Sahara (Le Désert: Le Sahara), one of the starkest of all Orientalist
images of the desert.44 In reducing landscape to two spheres, earth and sky, delimited by a perfectly
flat horizon, it is above all an essay in light. The painter works to confuse the division between earth
and sky, with graduating horizontal bands of earth, each taking on more of the light reflected from
the late afternoon sky, until earth and sky merge visually.

Guillaumet wrote of his own work in more conservative terms than Bénédite. At the beginning
of Tableaux algériens, he invokes a conceptual plan to record the traditional, progressive times of the
day rather than, like the impressionists, discern atomized fugitive moments. “In the limpid and cloud-
less atmosphere,” he wrote, “one sees the glow of a fiery disk that slowly sinks toward the horizon.
The sun, at the end of its race, o¤ers one supreme farewell to the earth; the summits of the moun-
tains, half bathed in shadow, are embraced and empurpled.”45 Guillaumet did not employ the lan-
guage of the impressionists, even if his younger interpreter Bénédite appeared convinced of its per-
tinence in his case.

The envelope or “moving fluid sheet” of air that was superheated (and thus di¤erent from the
French skies known to the impressionists) was perhaps the defining optical experience of the East for
Bénédite. It is not readily apparent in the meticulous paintings of Guillaumet, although it might per-
haps be discerned in his Seghia, Biskra of 1884 (La Séguia, Biskra, Fig. 20). In this landscape of beaten
earth, bleached chalk walls, and green shoots of new growth, the horizon behind the young woman
with the amphora conveys indeterminacy: “a band of pale emerald green softened by the distance,
a palm grove outlined against a sky that is cloudless, yet almost white with warm vapors.”46 But
Bénédite’s idea of the envelope of “impressionable” air seems, not surprisingly, better fitted to Renoir’s
work. In his Algiers Mosque for example, it would allow one to attribute the vagueness of lines, the
“palpitating atmosphere” of the image, to Renoir’s handling of superheated air—if it were not also
the artist’s standard practice in his French landscapes.

Indeed it seems fair to argue that liberated academic Orientalist artists—from the colorist Al-
bert Besnard (who painted Algeria in 1893–94) to Etienne Dinet (whose work became increasingly
colorful)—had a common debt to impressionism, the influence of which was pervasive, one way or
another, by 1890. That was the view taken by Roger Marx, who contradicted Bénédite when consid-

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism 53

figure 20 Gustave Guillaumet, The Seghia, Biskra, oil on canvas, 1884.

ering the birth of direct observation among young Salon Orientalists of that time: “It is certain that
they could not have evolved without Manet, as well as Monet and Sisley, whose powdery sunlit land-
scapes opened the eyes of more than one traveler. . . . Don’t these studies by Dinet, Marius Perret,
and Meunier apply the principles of the same [impressionist] school to the representation of Alge-
ria, where the scintillating whites of the terraces under a vibrant light are opposed to the blues of
overheated skies?” 47

At best Bénédite took the middle ground, seeing the discoveries of impressionists and Oriental-
ists as equivalent, but arguing that foreign location gave the Orientalists greater aesthetic plausibil-
ity when placing their work before the French public. Thus Belly was seldom attacked, and his “coura-
geous” work, labeled Orientalist, “enabled the acceptance of dangerous novelties without his
seeming to be a revolutionary.”48 Belly appears as the hardworking innovator, the impressionists as
revolutionaries less deserving of trust. That was apparently the opinion in Bénédite ’s discussion cir-
cle with the Orientalist painters Leroy, Dinet, and Perret.49

It is thus difficult to disentangle art history from self-interested lobbying. Bénédite ’s view may be
a form of special pleading, giving preference to his pet interest (Orientalism, current and historical)
over a movement (impressionism) that he subtly denigrated. The elusive link remains Auguste Renoir

54 Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

and his Algerian pictures. Because Bénédite never discussed them in his texts on Orientalism, he never
posited their challenge to his own version of history. Yet those works were familiar and well used by
Bénédite: they were shown regularly, no doubt with the artist’s consent, in Bénédite ’s new Salon ded-
icated to the Orientalist movement, which Renoir supported to the extent of becoming an honorary
member. From 1893 to 1900 Renoir showed a total of nine Algerian canvases at the Society of French
Orientalist Painters. The critics who reviewed them declared their brilliant tonal e¤ects proof of im-
pressionism’s aesthetic superiority. A “radiant pair of canvases,” Antoine de la Rochefoucauld called
Seated Algerian Woman and Young Arab Boy: “Masterpieces quite alone in this place, . . . their spark-
ling tonalities bring the neighboring potboilers crashing down.”50

In this chapter I have posited a relation between a major figure, Renoir, and precisely such aca-
demic “potboilers.” To consider Renoir as an Orientalist has required uncovering the body of his
Algerian pictures, not considered as a group since 1930. The paintings themselves disclose links with
the iconography of the North African colony, in sites well established for their cultural and touris-
tic interest. But when Renoir painted at the Mosque of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman or in the Jardin d’Essai
of Algiers, he did so with an intensity and visual acuity that transcend anything found in the touris-
tic or pedestrian topographical view. His impressionist work in an exotic site forces a critical recon-
sideration of the aesthetics of the Eastern scene, from the legacy of Fromentin to the quasi-scientific
program of Bénédite.

Renoir’s contributions to the genre of Europeans in indigenous costume are among the most
lavish that exist. But in a sense his more original figural work is on the terrain of academic natural-
ism itself: the “ethnic type,” the indigenous character. Renoir did not care for the paraphernalia of
ethnographic art, the chilling specification. In avoiding these, the best of his small canvases achieve
a human immediacy and openness that were valuable at a time when racial description could be the
handmaiden of repressive colonial policy.

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism 55



3 A Society for Orientalists

Léonce Bénédite and the Colonial Context
The advent of a society for Orientalist painters marks a dramatic shift in the consciousness of prac-
titioners near the end of the nineteenth century. Few were now content to work as individuals, trav-
eling alone to the East and showing their works amid the visual competition of the annual Salon.
Collegiality, the sense of belonging to a communal movement, had ceased to be the preserve of avant-
garde groups like the impressionists. Artists’ societies, special-interest exhibiting bodies with their
own aesthetic agendas, proliferated in fin-de-siècle France. Such societies, from the Union of Women
Painters and Sculptors to the Society of Painter-Lithographers, typify the sociology of art in the
modern era.1 Studying them has the potential to rewrite the canon of significant movements, to reread
the aesthetico-biographic standard of art history in this period.

In this chapter, then, I study Orientalist painting a third way: through the institution, rather than
in the work of individual masters or via the filter of art criticism. This approach makes more explicit
the circuits of production by which Orientalist art came into being, was exhibited and reviewed, and
was absorbed into French colonial culture. The Society of French Orientalist Painters (society or
Orientalist Painters for short) can be understood as a collectivity authoring Orientalism. One focus

57

of this chapter is the collectivity as such, the society’s structures and strategies considered as work-
ing toward the consolidation of the organization. The society sought to establish its institutional power
in a network of art world and colonial relations.2

Another focus is the Orientalism the society itself discloses—after all, in defining itself as a group
of Orientalist painters, it provided robust clues to the discourse of Orientalism as a historical actu-
ality. The society was born of an existing category of French Salon criticism—the “art orientaliste”
of Castagnary and his contemporaries—and curatorial initiatives that were profoundly historicist
in conception. The latter-day Orientalism that I examine in this book was conditioned both by a sense
of belated arrival at the project of exoticism, after a century of e¤ort by artist travelers, and by the
strong desire to renew the genre with France at the apogee of its colonial expansion.3

It is often impossible to separate the history of institutions from the persons who constructed them.4
The Society of French Orientalist Painters is inseparable from Léonce Bénédite, its founder, who
served as president until his death in 1925. Chapter 2 recounted Bénédite ’s establishment of an aes-
thetics for Orientalist art based on light (and the model of impressionism). Well before setting up
the society he had staked his claim, lecturing at the Central Union of the Decorative Arts in the later
1880s on eighteenth-century chinoiserie and the influence of the Orient on French fashion, hoping
to attract French artisans to the example of Islamic art in particular.5 When Gustave Guillaumet died
in 1887, Bénédite wrote an obituary essay situating him at the end of a tradition of Orientalist paint-
ing in the French school. And in 1890, reviewing the official Salon (it had split into two that year) for
the leading conservative journal L’Artiste, Bénédite looked exclusively at the Orientalist painting on
view.6 His writing performed the critical task of defining the category of Orientalist art, whether his-
torical or contemporary. Thus textual models of an Orientalist movement preceded its curatorial re-
alization in exhibitions.

Books on the Orient had been essential in forming Bénédite ’s own early fascination for life out-
side France. In a rare autobiographical moment Bénédite recalled the “mysterious and inexplicable
attraction” he had felt since childhood for the “fairyland” of Africa and the Muslim world. He im-
mersed himself in the tales of Scheherazade of the Thousand and One Nights and of the Bible, “al-
ways for me a living book.” His attitude toward the schoolbook discipline of geography was imag-
inative and sensuous as he recalled his love for the “sonorous names” of the African and Asian capitals
learned in the classroom, where French children in the later nineteenth century encountered texts on
the East, religious, cartographic, or colonial. One of Bénédite ’s experiences was urgently personal,
however: “In the evenings in my provincial town, I would go out under the stars to seek the intoxi-
cating perfume of the seraglio incense that the Tunisian Jews or the Moors from Algiers, coi¤ed in
tarbouches [cylindrical red Turkish hats] or multicolored turbans, burned in front of their shops in
the nocturnal illumination of the fair. Evidently I too was predestined for Orientalism.”7

Brought up in the Mediterranean city of Nîmes (once a Roman town), Bénédite encountered North

58 A Society for Orientalists

African merchants less as a matter of romantic “predestination” than as part of the reality of com-
merce in imperial France. Colonial subjects had already begun a limited immigration to the metro-
politan state, implanting their culture on the fringes of French society. Such an East was on France ’s
doorstep and Bénédite could write that “a trip of forty-eight hours suffices to throw us headlong into
the most profound distancing of space and time.”8 As an adult Bénédite made that trip many times,
taking an exhibition to Tunisia in 1897, visiting Dinet at Bou-Saâda in 1905, returning to open the
Algiers Municipal Museum in 1908, traveling with the painter Charles Cottet in 1911. Bénédite prob-
ably also knew Cairo, because his brother, the Egyptologist Georges Bénédite (who remodeled Jean-
François Champollion’s display of Egyptian art at the Louvre in the 1890s), traveled there frequently.
Orientalism often ran in families.

After training in history and law, Léonce too sought a career in the museum world, and indeed
married into it, wedding the daughter of the distinguished Louvre curator Georges Lafenestre in the
1880s. Bénédite was an assistant curator at the Château de Versailles from 1882 and from 1886 at the
Luxembourg, where he was appointed acting curator in 1892 on the death of Etienne Arago and cu-
rator in 1895. At the Luxembourg he spent three decades acquiring works for the state, organizing
exhibitions, representing the French museums overseas, and publishing a long series of monographs
on later-nineteenth-century artists. Given the aesthetic preferences revealed by the Caillebotte a¤air,
it is not surprising that none of these artists belonged to the avant-garde.9 Bénédite today, if re-
membered at all, is said to have been a “bad curator,” no doubt because he failed to purchase works
by the future icons of modern art Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso—dispersed to the great collections
of Russia, Germany, and the United States during his tenure.

At the Luxembourg Bénédite had the power base to substantiate his ideas on a movement he felt
the current French colonial expansion made significant. By his own account, the Algerian pavilion
at the Universal Exposition of 1889 in Paris planted the idea for a grouping of Orientalist artists. The
exposition connection is significant in several ways. Although the 1889 exposition is best remembered
for its monument to futuristic technology, the Ei¤el Tower, its colonial component was greater than
any previous assemblage. The Trocadéro Gardens housed dozens of colonial pavilions, presenting
in microcosm the expanding colonial empire of France, which had recently added the Tunisian pro-
tectorate and nascent colonies in Indochina and Madagascar. French architects designed the official
pavilion buildings to imitate the “indigenous” structures of each colony in a facsimile architecture
built of lightweight materials over demountable frames. Other exotic milieux were commercial en-
terprises, like the Cairo Street, built using fragments of Cairene buildings condemned to make way
for colonial modernity.10 The nearby zone of native villages brought home to the bourgeoisie the ac-
tuality of indigenous lives in French possessions overseas. The Kanaka Village studied by Paul Gau-
guin and Emile Bernard was sta¤ed by indigenous people brought from across the world to perform
quotidian tasks; its bamboo huts, sculptural ensembles, photographic displays, and government pam-

A Society for Orientalists 59

figure 21
G. Fraipont,
Algerian Exposition:
The Interior Courtyard,
wood engraving,
Paris Exposition,

1889.

phlets were instrumental in Gauguin’s desire to immigrate to Tahiti: exoticist art resulted from gov-
ernment propaganda.11

Fittingly, the Moorish palace, which served as the pavilion of Algeria, richest of the French
colonies, contained the germ of the Society of French Orientalist Painters (Fig. 21). Beyond the souk
with its weapons and leather goods, beyond the displays of carpet weaving and the halls of colonial
products packed with wine casks, billets of cork, and alabaster columns, lay the little Salon of Al-
gerian Fine Art, which featured the pictorial e¤orts of French artists and amateurs resident in the
sixty-year-old colony, bolstered by the works of Paris-based professionals like Gustave Guillaumet,
Dinet, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, Charles Landelle, and Paul Leroy. In the exhibition were “quanti-
ties of pictures, figure studies, and Algerian landscapes . . . sketches done before nature on morn-
ings of travel, works caressed by artists . . . surprised to find the Orient so little romantic in its strange-
ness.”12 The official catalogue intoned, “Today Algeria, as a worthy daughter of France, shows that
she honors the arts. . . . Algeria has inspired masterpieces of painting—Delacroix, Fromentin, and
Guillaumet have immortalized the magic of her infinite horizons, her colors improbably intense for
anyone who has not seen the ‘Pays du Soleil.’”13 Painting becomes visual evidence of the strange-
ness and di¤erence of a distant land that could nevertheless be a home to the French and their proud-
est cultural achievements.

This Algerian exhibition of 1889 galvanized those who were to found the Society of French Ori-
entalist Painters. Armand Point, the well-known symbolist, who had been born in Algeria and had
begun his career painting desert landscapes,14 selected the works shown. He favored the postroman-

60 A Society for Orientalists

tic generation of austere naturalists inspired by Guillaumet: the group of Dinet, Leroy, Perret, and
Paul Bu¤et that had been championed in the pages of L’Artiste by their friend Bénédite. Once named
curator of the Luxembourg in 1892, Bénédite mounted the First Retrospective and Current Exhibition
of French Orientalist Painters. It opened in 1893 at the Palace of Industry.15 Its success was such that
the actual Society of French Orientalist Painters was established the following year.

Bénédite aimed, with the financial support of the minister of public instruction and fine arts and
the Musées nationaux, to situate Orientalism in the history of French painting.16 His curatorial strat-
egy was twofold: to display the Orientalist heritage and to marshal its contemporary expressions.
The memory of the 1889 exhibitions demonstrating the genius of the French school profoundly
marked the retrospective section. Curated with an acute historical awareness by Roger Marx and
Manet’s friend Antonin Proust, the Centennial and Decennial of French Art (1789–1878 and
1878–1888) had provided an overview of the French school’s achievement from Jacques-Louis
David’s time to the present.17

Similarly, Bénédite ’s manifesto would prove that the Orientalists themselves formed a bona fide
school, whose genealogy Bénédite would establish with a string of great names. To that end he as-
sembled two hundred works for the retrospective, from Ingres to Guillaumet, concentrating on the
major nineteenth-century Orientalists like Delacroix (twenty works, most of them Moroccan wa-
tercolors lent by the Louvre), Chassériau (seventeen Algerian canvases), and Belly (twenty-one oils
from Egypt), with rarer pieces by masters like Anne-Louis Girodet, Ingres, and Regnault who had
been occasional Orientalists.

Bénédite ’s position on Orientalism is interesting in part for its knitting of art-historical concepts
into the broad frame of French colonialism. Nostalgia informed most of the things he wrote. He un-
derstood the “lure” of the exotic, for example, as the desire for access to knowledge about distant
civilizations: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the European fascination for Far Eastern dec-
orative arts had been spiced by the mystery of the cultures that produced them. Similarly, for Bénédite
the Orientalists of the boudoir and opera of the rococo period necessarily had to imagine a great deal
in developing their “dubious” imagery.18 Bénédite knew that older literary texts (such as the baron
de Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes) had been a more common source for painters than direct experi-
ence of the cultures evoked. Even Delacroix, before traveling to become a “proper” Orientalist, had
painted from antique literature and contemporary news reports.

Like Gautier before him, Bénédite recognized that the exotic impelled young artists to travel. The
terms of the exotic had changed, however, after a century of colonial expansion and technological
development: “The Orientalist Painters correspond, for their part, to this need for the unknown, this
thirst for far-o¤ things, this taste for exoticism that grips us in our Occident where there is nothing
left to learn, at the dawn of a day when every part of our world—almost entirely explored, organ-
ized, administered—will soon be as familiar to us as the crossroads of some great and unique city.”

A Society for Orientalists 61

In prefiguring the global village, Bénédite saw the link between exoticism and European economic
structures, from the old colonial trading companies supporting chinoiserie to the more pervasive ad-
ministrations of modern settler colonialism. He accepted the political impulses that drove the Euro-
pean colonial machine, writing frankly of the renewed greed and intense rivalry arising “since the
impenetrable mystery of Africa has been torn aside by so many intrepid explorers and since old Eu-
rope has hastened, in a sudden burst of covetousness (élan de convoitise), to the final partition of un-
known worlds.”19

For Bénédite the “scramble for Africa” required a knowledge of colonized places.20 In the liter-
ary and visual arts it demanded a language di¤erent from that of romanticism, which had seemed to
thrive on a lack of knowledge about the Other. The political expansion of his day, Bénédite reasoned,
was better served by the language of naturalism, of observation and the direct experience of di¤er-
ent climes and their peoples.

That empirical approach, combined with a new consciousness of historical roots, was the rally-
ing point for the fifty contemporary Orientalists Bénédite assembled in 1893, from art world lions
like Albert Besnard to unknowns who had received scholarships to study in the colonies. Their two
hundred and fifty paintings were proof of the vitality of the contemporary “Ecole Orientaliste” (as
he called it), for which (as Gautier had written) the East had indeed supplanted Italy as the land of
inspiration. The new generation filled the psychological need to bring “sensations of torrid light and
melancholic grandeur” to “our blasé and dulled senses.”21 The duty of painters capturing the sarto-
rial and ethnographic fascination of patriarchal Arab life in “Muslim France,” Bénédite claimed, was
to document and, where possible, protect it from the vicissitudes of a harsh colonialism.

Such words exemplify the self-conscious platform an art society can engender. The spirit of cul-
tural reconciliation put briefly on an official footing during Napoléon III’s visit to Algeria in 1865
bore fruit in the 1890s. The Orientalist Painters sought not just to foster French art in the colonies
but also to bring the richness of colonized cultures to the attention of the metropolitan public. The
1893 Orientalist exhibition was in fact grafted to a far larger venture: the Muslim Art Exhibition, the
first major display of Islamic art ever held in France.22 The five thousand artifacts in the Palais de
l’Industrie came from diverse collections: from explorers like Gabriel Bonvalot, Islamic notables like
Hakky Bey, aristocrats like the baron de Rothschild, and Orientalist painters like Gérôme. Commercial
interests were also enlisted for the exhibition: Paul Argand, whose Magasins de la Place Clichy o¤ered
four hundred rugs for sale through the catalogue, was a lender to the exhibition (Fig. 22). Samuel
Bing, the great entrepreneur associated with japonisme and art nouveau, also participated. A high-
light of the exhibition was the collection of twenty-two Persian and Indian miniatures belonging to
Louis Gonse, japoniste and director of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.23 The entrepreneurial idea for the
exhibition is apparent in a letter from its organizing president, Eugène Etienne, seeking funds: “The
aim is to provide historical study, criticism, and art with documents that have never been assembled

62 A Society for Orientalists

figure 22
Eugène Grasset,
A la Place Clichy,
typographic poster,
ca. 1895.

63

figure 23
Frédéric Régamey,
The Colonial Delegates,
November 1892, oil on

canvas, 1892.

before, and also to divert for France ’s profit a flow of ideas and business more or less monopolized
by our neighbors the English and the Germans. Our industry, our commerce, our metropolitan or
colonial arts could receive great benefits from this entirely new initiative.”24

In this politician’s view the arts are players in rivalries between the European powers: scholarly
knowledge of the Islamic arts, a field dominated by France ’s opponents, is closely linked to the suc-
cess of commerce and manufacturing.25 Similarly the curator Georges Marye wished to familiarize
the French public with previously disdained Islamic art, in hopes that it might become as popular as
Japanese art. Such a reversal of taste, he wrote, would be one “from which the two great Muslim
provinces subject to the domination of France [Algeria and Tunisia] must benefit.” Such was the tenor
of language in the heyday of France ’s new imperialism. Marye hoped to protect North African cul-

64 A Society for Orientalists

ture from the depredations of “the Algerian colonists, whose hatred for the native and contempt for
art have been deleterious to the colony” (phrases deleted in the published version).26 His exhibition
was designed to redress the situation by stimulating the North African manufacturing industries’ study
of ancient models. At the same time, he believed metropolitan French manufacturing would benefit
from the study of the handwork tradition and the beauty of masterpieces of Islamic art (a thesis I
examine in Chapter 8).

Such arguments help explain the considerable support given the Muslim Art Exhibition by elite
French procolonial politicians. The aging Jules Ferry, a former prime minister whose policies had
spurred France ’s aggressive colonial expansion during the 1880s (especially the conquest of Tonkin
and of Madagascar) was its honorary founder-president. Its president, Eugène Etienne, led the colo-
nial faction in the French government and was a major force behind the French push to create an
“Afrique française” that would include Morocco. In the canvas The Colonial Delegates, November 1892
(Les délégués aux colonies, novembre 1892) by Frédéric Régamey, the veteran painter of Japan and the
Far East (Fig. 23), Etienne is second from the left. Busts of King Louis XIV and Field Marshal Bugeaud
(victor and early governor in Algeria) preside over the bewhiskered civilian decision makers, seen
directing the course of world events from their office in Paris. In the background, rising before a
painted allegory of France distributing law and art to the Arabs and the Indochinese, is a full-length
statue of Joseph-François Dupleix, governor of French India in the eighteenth century, when
France ’s territorial expansion reached its initial apogee. At the feet of the colonial parliamentarians
lie the artifacts of exotic cultures—Polynesian weapons and West African sculptures—presented as
the booty of colonial triumphs. More discreetly o¤ to the side in an alcove, stu¤ed tropical birds record
the benefits of scientific collection in the French empire.27

The contemporary Muslim Art Exhibition also served the colonial project by trumpeting the suc-
cess of France ’s campaigns of colonial expansion in North Africa and, more subtly, valorizing the
culture and traditions of France ’s Islamic possessions. In that context, the role of the Orientalist
Painters displayed in rooms adjoining the Islamic art was to visualize both those climes and the cul-
tures that had brought the artifacts into use.

Internal Strategies of Consolidation

The exhibition of Orientalist painting and traditional Islamic art together established the ideologi-
cal ambience of the Society of French Orientalist Painters and helped fix its key internal strategies.
In discussing these, I focus on the collectivity of the Orientalist Painters, reading the society’s struc-
tures and strategies as working to consolidate the institution and secure its place in the art world.

Consolidation typifies the dynamic forming many artists’ societies, whatever their specific plat-
forms. The Union of Women Painters and Sculptors had a commitment to furthering women’s art,28

A Society for Orientalists 65

just as the Orientalist Painters had one to promoting the public awareness of the colonies. If the So-
ciety of French Orientalist Painters was unusual, that was because it had so many official attachments
and its platform was so evidently tied to the politics of the colonial movement.

The actual founding of the society took place in 1894 with the drawing up of statutes and the ap-
pointment of an executive and a committee of patrons. The statutes make clear that the aims extended
beyond the exhibition of art: “First Article. The Society . . . aims to promote artistic studies inspired
by the countries and civilizations of the Orient and Extreme-Orient by any means at its disposal: an-
nual exhibitions, retrospective exhibitions, publications, lectures, missions, encouragements to artists,
to local societies, to museums, and so forth.” It engages, furthermore, to improve knowledge of the
lands and indigenous races of those parts of the world, to give critical direction to the study of their
ancient arts, and to contribute to the restoration of their local industries.29

It is possible the society modeled its aims, social benefit and scholarly di¤usion, on those of the
International Congress of Orientalists, a body of philologists and archaeologists that since 1873 had
shaped the broader discursive field of Orientalism (as Said has elucidated it). Bénédite ’s brother
Georges, the Egyptologist, was one of those Orientalists “proper.”30 The comparable gathering of
material by the Orientalist Painters resulted, not in scholarly exposés, but in the sober exhibition of
canvases of empirical bent, underwritten by documentary experience gained in situ.

Fourteen artists formed the executive committee of the “closed little society, recruited with care
and tightly knit.”31 The core group were the Orientalists from the Algerian pavilion and their
friends—a technically conservative group by modernist standards. As in the case of Renoir, how-
ever, there were exceptions. Charles Cottet was the only committee member with a body of work
recognized in more progressive circles of the time. Cottet was a friend of Vuillard’s and Félix Val-
lotton’s and had exhibited at Vollard’s gallery and that of Le Barc de Boutteville. With Lucien Si-
mon (a friend of Dinet’s), Cottet led the Bande Noire group of painters that tried, with some suc-
cess, to “change the style and subject matter of academic painting by introducing intimiste and realist
themes.”32 On trips to Egypt in the 1890s he had developed an exotic variant on the mournful cre-
puscular paintings of Breton fisherfolk for which he was famous (see Chapter 4).

Cottet, Dinet, and the other Orientalist committee members helped the president mount the an-
nual Salon, selecting works and determining the composition of the society’s ever-expanding list of
officers and associates. By 1900 the artists in honorary positions included Gérôme and Benjamin Con-
stant (both distinguished older Orientalists holding chairs at the Institut de France) and well-known
figures like Besnard, Fernand Cormon, Renoir, James Tissot (famous for his series on the life of
Christ), and Georges Rochegrosse (who had taken up permanent residence in Algiers).

More than the artists, the society’s patrons indicated Orientalism’s colonial context. Following the
model of the Muslim Art Exhibition (from which it inherited some key patrons) the society strate-
gically sought prestige and material aid for the institutional cause. The right patronage was crucial

66 A Society for Orientalists

in establishing the network of power relations that supported such cultural institutions. After 1900
senior Beaux-Arts and museum people like Roger Marx and Georges Lafenestre sat cheek by jowl
with personages from the official world of colonial relations, like Paul Doumer, former governor-
general of Indochina, or Deputy Georges Leygues, an influential colonial politician who became min-
ister of the colonies.

From the outset an important patron of the Orientalist Painters was the head of the Comité Du-
pleix, named for the eighteenth-century French colonial administrator and soldier. A pressure group
that promoted France’s colonial interests in the government and in commerce, the committee was led
by Gabriel Bonvalot, a noted explorer, whose accounts of journeys to Central Asia, Siberia, and Tonkin
were widely read.33 Bonvalot’s alliance with the Orientalist Painters symbolizes the colonial experi-
ence as one involving active exploration and dangerous encounters communicated in visual or writ-
ten reportage, for Bénédite explicitly likened the Orientalist Painters’ role to that of the Comité Du-
pleix. Both aimed “to open up our vast new territories, to people them, to make them known and liked,
to generate goodwill for the indigenous races, to familiarize us more each day with these new
provinces of France.”34 This “patriotic duty” (as Bénédite called it) could take at least two forms: the
general consciousness-raising represented by the exhibition in Paris of a mass of painted images of
the French colonies, and the more explicit propagande par l’image (to use one of his favorite phrases—
at this time the word “propaganda” lacked the odium that attaches to it in the post-totalitarian world)
of society members who traveled in the colonies on official missions, attached to military expeditions
or voyages of exploration (Fig. 24).

The best example of such a member is Maurice Potter. A committed Orientalist and former stu-
dent of Dinet who exhibited regularly at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, Potter had
worked in Laghouat and Bou-Saâda. At the Orientalist Painters in the 1890s he exhibited not only
observed scenes but also illustrations to Flaubert’s Salammbô. He went to East Africa as the artist at-
tached to the 1897 expedition of Gabriel Bonvalot (Fig. 25), which followed on the heels of one led
by Ambassador Léonce Lagarde, recently returned from Abyssinia with another of the Orientalist
Painters, Paul Bu¤et.35 Bonvalot was eventually to meet up with France ’s Colonel Marchand during
his march on Fashoda in competition with a British expedition, in what rated as one of the most difficult
episodes in the European dismemberment of Africa.36 As a member of Bonvalot’s group, which in-
cluded a Russian colonel and three other Frenchmen, Potter sketched the landscape, prepared birds
and insect specimens for scientific collection, and was frequently ill. He died on the Abyssinian Plateau,
speared in the side by a local when the column was passing through long grass. But such events did
nothing to stem the missionary zeal of the Orientalist Painters. Quite the contrary: in his obituary
remarks of 1900, Bénédite exalted the heroic visual reportage of Potter and other society artists who
had traveled in remote Africa and Indochina with the cash and good wishes of the minister of the
colonies.37

A Society for Orientalists 67

figure 24
Marius Perret, Souvenir of

the Fouta Expedition,
lithograph, 1892.

figure 25
The Bonvalot Mission in
Abyssinia, with Maurice
Potter second from left,

Gabriel Bonvalot
center, 1897.

68

But ministerial patronage was not enough to legitimize the Orientalist Painters in the eyes of the
art world. The society needed an appropriate aesthetic environment for the presentation of works—
a proper annual Salon, to establish the society’s profile in the Parisian cultural calendar. The Orien-
talist Painters opened early each February from 1895 on, well before the official Salons, making theirs
one of the first exhibitions of the new year and improving the likelihood of its being reviewed. The
society’s exhibitions ran, with only occasional interruptions, right up to World War II.38

As curator of the Luxembourg, Bénédite would have had little trouble negotiating a congenial ex-
hibition space, but his choice is nevertheless surprising: the prestigious commercial Galeries Durand-
Ruel. Durand-Ruel was the dealer who had made his fortune as the supporter of Monet and the im-
pressionist painters (while also managing a stock of earlier progressives like Corot and Delacroix).
Renoir was represented by Durand-Ruel, as we have seen. The society recognized the ratifying power
of a modernist who aestheticized the Orient. It not only courted Renoir in the 1890s but, as we shall
see, recuperated Gauguin after his death and even promoted cubist renditions of colonial themes af-
ter 1910.

The Orientalist Painters’ mainstay, however, consisted of more academic works, represented in
the extreme by those of Gérôme himself. One of the most institutionally powerful of all French
painters, a self-made millionaire who had debuted at the Salon as long ago as 1847, Gérôme could
not be ignored by Bénédite (who nevertheless, considering his work outmoded, excluded him from
his histories of Orientalism).39 Gérôme’s sometimes lascivious Orientalist paintings, along with works
on his favorite theme of daily life in the ancient world, had established his reputation. Until 1900 he
exhibited several works each year at the Orientalist Painters, primarily studies made in the Islamic
monuments of Cairo and, in 1896 and 1897, the curious chryselephantine sculptures he took up in
the last decade of his life. The society, in affiliating itself with such prominent official artists, among
other things, ensured patronage from the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts.

Another of the society’s strategies of internal consolidation was to maintain historical perspec-
tive on the Orientalist movement. Not until the 1906 National Colonial Exposition of Marseille was
there another survey of older Orientalist art like Bénédite ’s of 1893. Upon moving to Durand-Ruel,
Bénédite instituted a series of retrospectives of single exemplary Orientalists that provided a finer
grain to his imaging of the Orientalist aesthetic. The four artists Bénédite chose were both less fa-
miliar to the public than canonical Orientalists like Delacroix or Fromentin and closer to contempo-
rary concerns—such was Bénédite ’s didacticism in a series of exhibitions meant to encourage young
artists to paint in the East.

Thus in 1895 there were two dozen works by Alfred Dehodencq, the tumultuous figure painter
who had worked in Morocco. He massed his figures up the canvas in baroque plenitude and special-
ized in violent crowd scenes, like his Execution of the Jewish Woman (Le massacre de la Juive, Fig. 26).
At first glance this image reverberates with Gospel iconography, recalling the parable of the woman

A Society for Orientalists 69

figure 26
Alfred Dehodencq,
Execution of the Jewish
Woman, oil on canvas,

n.d.

taken in adultery. But in transposing the scene to the sultanate of Morocco (Dehodencq was a long-
term resident of Tangier prior to his suicide) and omitting a Christ-like protector for the terrified
kneeling woman, Dehodencq makes it easy to indict the severity of Islamic justice meted out by the
dark-skinned figures towering over her. For the 1895 retrospective Bénédite and Dehodencq’s biog-
rapher, Gabriel Séailles, gathered a group of such images. They included Execution (L’Exécution),
Bastinado (La Bastonnade), and The Punishment of Thieves (Le supplice des voleurs), the last presum-
ably showing the atrocious torture of cutting and binding the hands in salt—a detailed account of

70 A Society for Orientalists

which is the most indelible image in the contemporary travelogue by Pierre Loti, Au Maroc. Such
paintings have much in common with the violence in the Luxembourg’s Summary Execution under
the Moorish Kings of Granada by Dehodencq’s contemporary Henri Regnault.

It would have been unfair and repellent to focus on such scenes, however, and Bénédite gave am-
ple space to Dehodencq’s more peaceable subjects. Thus a Little Gypsy Girl (Petite bohémienne) and
a Little Orange Seller (Petit marchand d’oranges) form the counterpoint, as do Dehodencq’s best-known
series, his carefully observed Moroccan storytellers, traveling musicians, and marriage ceremonies.40
Such subjects take up the agreeable sociality and color of Delacroix’s Jewish Wedding, enlarging in
oils on scenes of daily life that Delacroix had left latent, as it were, in his Moroccan notebooks and
watercolors.

In 1897 it was the turn of Chassériau, the star of late romanticism who had combined the colorism
and tumult of Delacroix with the seductions of Ingresque line in some of the best Salon pictures of
the 1840s and 1850s. Bénédite was able to borrow his famous Portrait of the Caliph of Constantine from
the Château de Versailles and some of the small scenes of battling tribesmen now in the Louvre.41
These and numerous other works were assembled with the aid of the artist’s descendant, Baron Arthur
de Chassériau (who became the society’s president after Bénédite ’s death in 1925). The retrospec-
tives of 1898 and 1899 presented landscapes and figure paintings by Belly and Guillaumet that ex-
emplified the preoccupation with conditions of light and atmosphere; again family connection explains
how some fifty works by each artist were lent by Bénédite. Belly’s remarkable Pilgrims Going to
Mecca, from the Salon of 1861, was a popular work on continuous exhibition at the Luxembourg in
the 1870s, and the Louvre after 1881. Today Belly’s and Guillaumet’s role in the history of Orien-
talism has been recognized at the Musée d’Orsay, where their works dominate the one room perma-
nently given over to the movement.

Thus ended the series of exhibitions of acknowledged masters, frankly genealogical in purpose,
intended to legitimize the nascent group, give historical substance to Orientalism as a pictorial prac-
tice, and also, as Bénédite remarked, inspire young painters entering the vocation of painter traveler.
His strategy for giving the Orientalist Painters prestige was certainly successful: many reviewers were
delighted to expatiate on the work of these indisputably impressive artists.

If the society’s retrospectives in the nineties achieved genealogical consolidation, after 1900 came
the moment of institutional self-reflection. The society moved from Durand-Ruel’s to the Grand
Palais, built to house the fine arts at the Universal Exposition of 1900 and thereafter the main state-
run venue for temporary Salons and exhibitions of all kinds. At the Grand Palais the Orientalist ex-
hibitions could expand greatly in scale. (The apogee of one thousand paintings was reached in 1913.)
The society also began to assert its institutional identity in a di¤erent way: the retrospective gaze
turned from illustrious predecessors to its own members. Just as the death of Guillaumet in 1887 had
precipitated the group’s initial sense of mission, so the tragic deaths of two young members led to a

A Society for Orientalists 71

figure 27
Etienne Dinet, Portrait of
Sliman ben Ibrahim, oil on

cardboard, ca. 1902.

new form of group solidarity. Shows were mounted for the Ethiopian casualty Maurice Potter and
for Marius Perret, who had died of illness in Java in 1900. Gérôme’s death in 1904 at the age of eighty-
two led to a memorial exhibition of seventeen works. Later retrospectives showed works by the ethno-
graphic sculptor Charles Cordier and by Constant-Georges Gasté, who died while painting in India
in 1910.42 Such consecrations consolidated the membership of the Orientalist Painters and, with the
assurance that members’ deaths did not go unrecognized, established the atmosphere of a friendly
society or union.

The Orientalist Painters had other strategies for encouraging its members to identify with the so-
ciety. Membership o¤ered distinct ceremonial advantages: these, after all, were the “banquet years”
of which Roger Shattuck wrote so exuberantly.43 In those days an annual exhibition was celebrated
with a formal dinner. A journalist recounts the banquet that closed the exhibition of 1896: “The menu
was frankly exotic . . . a couscous, prepared in nomad fashion, had actually been executed under the
direction of Sliman ben Ibrahim, a Mozabite sheikh brought to Paris by M. Dinet. . . . Adding to the
seductions of the cuisine was the table, embellished by the little Caravan of M. Théodore Rivière, so
ingenious and so vibrant, and at the end by magnificent baskets of exotic fruits. Several toasts were

72 A Society for Orientalists

figure 28
Paul Leroy, The Chourbah:
The Orientalists’ Dinner,
lithograph, 1897.

proposed . . . one, in Arabic, by Sliman ben Ibrahim, had a particular success.”44 Sliman ben Ibrahim,
lifelong friend of Etienne Dinet’s, who collaborated with the artist from 1890 and shared his house
at Bou-Saâda from 1903, regularly visited Paris and assisted in the Orientalist Painters’ activities
(Fig. 27).45 Sliman became the society’s unique correspondant indigène—a token figure in an other-
wise all-white men’s group who would have witnessed at their gatherings all the bewhiskered ban-
ter of a nineteenth-century smoker at a private gentlemen’s club.

The decor for the Dîner des Orientalistes was scrupulously planned. Members like Leroy, Dinet,
and Alexandre Lunois produced lithographic designs for the menus in successive years, each with a
figure of an indigenous woman or child opposite the sequence of dishes listed in Arabic script (Fig.
28); both Leroy and Dinet had studied Arabic from the 1880s. The banquet tables were regularly or-
namented with the “lively little figurines of Théodore Rivière and the terra-cotta animals from Nabeul
[in Tunisia] that are so decorative.”46

On such an occasion in 1899 the Orientalists were joined by several distinguished guests, Minis-
ter for the Colonies André Lebon, Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts Rambaud, and Di-
rector of Fine Arts Henri Roujon. Once these gentlemen had been softened up by the North African

A Society for Orientalists 73

meal and decor, by the toasts, and by Bénédite ’s eloquent address, the business of patronage began
in earnest. According to Bénédite ’s account, Lebon assured those present of his full support for the
society’s work at the forthcoming Universal Exposition, “because the activity of the Orientalists
profits the vast, far-flung empires that he [Lebon] governs.” That was not just lip service: on the spot,
the minister rose and (responding to “the regret expressed by M. Charles Lemire, the former French
governor in Indochina, that our comrades limited themselves too exclusively to lands of Muslim civ-
ilization”) granted Orientalist Painters six free voyages to a French colony in Indochina or North
Africa.47 For his part, the minister of fine arts welcomed a suggestion that there be an annual com-
petition between the indigenous artisans of Algeria and Tunisia.

Clearly in the late 1890s the society’s interest in the arts of the colonized—at least the North African
colonies nearer at hand—was vigorous. This group of Frenchmen appropriated for its emblem or
logo (designed by Paul Leroy and printed on all its catalogues, posters, and menus) the sickle moon
of Islam, the star of David (or the seal of Solomon), and a black Hand of Fatma (Fig. 29). The surely
ambiguous image bespeaks the Frenchmen’s position as outsiders who nevertheless dreamed of cul-
tural synthesis.48 More conventional was the medal the society designed, struck, and awarded over a
period of many years—a gesture modeled on the standard reward for merit at the official Salons (Fig.
30). Its most interesting recipient was the Algerian miniaturist Mohammed Racim, in 1923. One side
featured a European palette and paintbrushes superimposed over a date palm and a backdrop of an
Egyptian sphinx, classical ruins, and a rising sun; the other was the society’s special emblem.

Ever mindful of new avenues for publicizing the art of the Orientalists, Bénédite, this time wear-
ing the hat of president of the Society of Painter-Lithographers, organized a special cumulative edi-
tion of the album of original lithographic prints published by L’Artiste three times a year (now a rare
collector’s item).49 This Album spéciale des Peintres Orientalistes was published in 1898 with some forty
prints accumulated over the half-decade by members presenting North African images similar to those
developed in their painting. For example Alexandre Lunois, a professional painter and printmaker
well known at the turn of the century for his extravagantly colored and expertly drawn lithographs
and posters of Spanish scenes—Gypsy dancers, guitarists, and bullfights doubtless known to the ado-
lescent Picasso—contributed a group of sensitively crafted images of young Algerian women in do-
mestic interiors. The oil painter Leroy sent in a meticulous crayon sketch of camels at the market in
Tolga and scenes of Ouled-Naïl women. Dinet submitted, among other subjects, a black-crayon lith-
ograph of a night scene—a men’s ritual dance before a bonfire in the open desert. The Album spé-
ciale is an accurate cross-section of the iconography that typified the work of the Orientalist Painters.

Among the most interesting prints is Algiers—Cocktail Hour (Alger—l’heure verte) by Adolphe
Chudant (Fig. 31). Chudant was one of the few Orientalist painters to act on the plea of organizers
of the 1893 Muslim Art Exhibition, that French artists and designers learn from their Islamic coun-
terparts. Primarily a landscapist, he had made a special study of the Nabeul potteries in Tunisia, paint-

74 A Society for Orientalists

figure 29
Paul Leroy, symbol of the
Society of French Orientalist
Painters, wood engraving,
1895.

figure 30
Victor Peter, medal awarded
by the Society of French
Orientalist Painters, 1899.

ing canvases of the potters at work—an interest sparked by his visit in 1897 to coordinate a group
show of Orientalist Painters at the Institut de Carthage in Tunis. Algiers—Cocktail Hour juxtaposes
ancient roof terraces against an image of modern shipping in the port of Algiers. The scene is set in
a lithographed frame decorated with diaper work derived from Maghrebian ceramic tile patterns.
Chudant, who had early training as an architect, maintained a keen interest in the decorative arts and
decorative painting.50 His design for one of the now rare posters advertising the Orientalist Painters’
Salon develops such decorative ideas on a larger and more emphatic scale (Fig. 32). Despite its dis-
tinct art nouveau flavor (somewhat reminiscent of works by Alphonse Mucha), Chudant’s image
of a mosaic and ceramic panel incorporates references to the decorative arts of North Africa, where

A Society for Orientalists 75

figure 31
Adolphe Chudant,
Algiers—Cocktail Hour,
lithograph, ca. 1895.
figure 32 Adolphe
Chudant, Sixth Exhibition
of the French Orientalist
Painters, lithograph, 1899.

76

he had traveled extensively. The patterns of Berber kilims, of classical floor mosaics of the kind
preserved at El Djem in Tunisia, and of Moorish foliate ornamentation are all visible in this curious
transcultural compilation.

The graphic arts output of the society—the Album spéciale, banquet menus, and posters—in addi-
tion to constituting a visual record of Orientalism in the 1890s, should be seen in the larger context
of the institutional formation that gave its artist members a sense of aesthetic and moral cohesive-
ness. Whether it also achieved cohesiveness in the mind of the public, however, can be judged only
in the record of the annual Salons, the Orientalist Painters’ yearly encounter with the Parisian art
critics—and the Salon goers whom they represented.

A Society for Orientalists 77