Tangier and Mogador

Eugène Delacroix traveled to Algeria and Morocco in 1832, where he imagined an intense eroticism in the people, their clothing, the culture and the landscapes.  The irony was that none of the women, Muslim or Jewish, would take their clothes off so Delacroix had to do it for them.  The painting below, Odalisque is from years later, 1857, by which time the erotic exotic of North Africa still persisted in his paintings.  He was particularly taken by Tangier and Mogador (now Essaouira). Curiously, the French navy bombarded Mogador a decade after his visit, generating a name for the courtesan La Mogador.

Does visiting a place make your paintings more authentic?  Is the image above more erotic and intimate than the one below, Odalisque with a Slave (1840) by Ingres, who never left Europe, yet who painted nudes in Turkish baths?

Edward Said’s influential critique of Orientalism would judge them both as inherently linked to colonialism.  Since then, others have defended such artistic endeavors because they were sincerely motivated by curiosity about other cultures, and that is true at least in the case of Delacroix.

It seems almost trivial though when you think of the young women of Mogador - Berber, Jewish - or the young women of southern Europe, who were abducted by the corsairs and ended up in the harems of Fez and Marrakech.

For other Orientalist paintings from this era, click here.

For other Delacroix paintings, see:
Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust
Archangel Saint Michael and St. Joan of Arc
George Sand and Chopin