Eugène Delacroix, Saint-Maurice, France 1798-1863 Paris, France, Juive d’Alger (Jewish Woman of Algiers), Etching, 1833

After befriending a Jewish family in Morocco in 1832, Eugène Delacroix created a number of images depicting young North African Jewish women in simple interiors. This print exemplifies the voyeuristic style of Orientalism, an artistic movement in which European men painted colonial fantasies of the Middle East and North Africa. The two figures look in the same direction, yet the seated woman, the titular Jewish woman of Algiers, sits in full view while the other woman, likely a Muslim and a servant, shields herself. Delacroix’s more detailed depiction of the Jewish woman’s attire highlights how the servant’s religion and socio-economic status precluded her from the same level of physical ostentatiousness. This etching presents a hierarchical relationship between two women who both would have been considered exotic to Delacroix’s European contemporaries.  

-Elana Bridges, Class of 2020

Bequest of Merrill Millar Lake (Class of 1936) 1980.54