# Transcript

Professor William Vaughan

He is somebody who is going to Algiers and Morocco at a time when France is beginning to take over those countries and he is a part of an imperialist venture, if you like, and he's looking at these cultures very much from the point of view of a western society. He is not trying to understand those cultures in a very deep sense, and we might say that what he's drawing from them are more vivid sense of colour and more dramatic sense of the exotic even a sense of a humanity that he feels that has been lost in his own society. But he's not actually involved in what the French are going to people in North Africa at that time, he's not concerned or interested in that. You might say that it's rather hard to expect him to be. One has to look at these things in context.

Melissa Berry

So was Delacroix’s artistic journey an example of cultural imperialism – or simply an attempt to find ways of understanding and describing a vivid North African culture?

Helen Gill

I think that it's clear, when Delacroix arrived in Morocco he had intellectual idea of orient. Five months after on his return his idea completely changed and I think what is very important is … something which is personal, really original, that when he thinks of orient he is always thinking of antiquity. For him the Arabs in the street seeking, resting. It's sort of normal senators, his great discovery when he arrives in Morocco. That in fact antiquity is living.

Alain Debray

Imagine, my friend, what it is to see lying in the sun, walking about the streets, cobbling shoes, figures like Roman consuls, like Cato or Brutus, I tell you, you’ll never be able to believe what I shall bring back, because it will be far removed from the natural truth and nobility of these men. There’s nothing finer in classical art.

Melissa Berry

Delacroix’s art expresses more complex ideas about the meeting of Eastern and Western cultures than a simple model of cultural imperialism would imply.

Helene Gill

He had a slightly sneering attitude towards those painters particularly French painters, who were perhaps over influenced by their admiration and wish to emulate or even copy the classical works of the past. And so when he went to Morocco he thought that here was in fact, Rome, but more so than Rome of contemporary days because he felt that this was a world which was the ancient world and so he did not really dress up Moroccans in order to portray them as Roman soilders as other orientialists and some contemporaries of his have done. But he sought a licence of humanity in particularly the clothing of the people he saw in Morocco as something which the western world had strayed from.

Melissa Berry

Delacroix’s 6 months stay in Morocco and brief stop in Algeria, gave him a wealth of material for future paintings, but the one that had the greatest impact was Women of Algiers in their Apartment.

Professor William Vaughan

I think the experience of Morocco did have a lasting effect. He'd always been interested in colour and that was perhaps why he was associated so much with romanticism in the 1820's and the sardanapalus was, if you like, the apex of that interest of that colour where you can find the strongest colours the most violent clashes. What he seems to turn his interest to in Morocco is the effects of colour in terms of harmonies.

Particularly the way that strong light can create more vivid effects of colour, but how they can balance together. One of the most interesting things in the Women of Algiers is the way that you find colours in the shadows. The way he allows defused colour to go throughout the whole picture and that is in a sense an experience that is going to become terribly important in the history of western painting it is something the impressionists pick up later on.

Melissa Berry

But did Delacroix persist in interpreting the Orient through the eyes of a dominant male viewer from a powerful nation.

Alain Debray

It's beautiful! It's like Homer's time! The woman in the gynoecium took care of her children, spun wool, and embroidered the most marvellous fabrics. This is woman as I understand her!

Helene Gill

Of course there is the question of the harem, which is represented in the femme d'algiers, Women of Algiers in their Apartments is not supposed to be seen by any westerner, in particular, not by male westerner. There is a lot of sexuality in the Women in Algiers in both paintings. The one painted in 1834, shortly after Delacroix's return from Morocco. And the one painted much later in 1849 which is different in outlook, but nevertheless has the same characters sitting broadly speaking in the same positions.

Now the first picture was a huge picture, a vast picture where the subjects are almost life size. Therefore the on looker is almost invited of join in, therefore to walk in and to transgress into the forbidden area of the women's apartments. The newness .. decorated with oriental artifacts, which is something very prevalent in orientialists paintings. There is a sort of bazaar of various objects to situate, to locate the scene. And the women are more on offer, so to speak. It has been remarked that the second picture, although very similar in composition is different in it's impact as well. It's a smaller picture. The lower line of horizon therefore not so much of an invitation to walk in because of the difference of scale. The different way in which the look, the gaze, positions itself when one looks at it. It's a more homely picture altogether, the light also comes quite naturally from the entrance and gives the whole thing a less theatrical atmosphere.

Melissa Berry

So had Delacroix’s exposure to a new culture modified his fundamentally Western and Romantic approach.

Professor William Vaughan

I think that picture does have a lot that we associate with romanticism still. And in a way you might say that Delacroix has carried this with him when he's come to north Africa. He's gone, hasn't gone there with ….. his mind is not empty, it's still full of his preoccupations and his interests. That sense of lethargy of the women, it isn't perhaps just something those women themselves expressed in algerial it's something that he has to some extent project it.

Helene Gill

We have a study in with the pastoral. Which is a very precise study of one of the women and all the details of her dress and also the batons she has on her little jacket. But it's almost that's all So that means that painting was executed only through Delacroix imagination.