Beauty and Empire: Formalist and Postcolonial Readings of Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment
Artworks rarely present themselves through a single mode of interpretation. A painting may initially attract the viewer through beauty, colour, atmosphere or technical skill, while also carrying the historical and ideological conditions of its production. This becomes especially significant in nineteenth-century European art, where representations of non-European people and places were shaped by aesthetic fascination and imperial power. What appears to be intimate or poetic may, therefore, reveal structures of possession, distance and unequal looking. Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment is a clear example of this tension. In his Salon of 1846, Charles Baudelaire described Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment as “a little interior poem, full of rest and silence”. While this phrase captures the painting’s atmospheric stillness, it also raises a critical question: what kind of silence is being aestheticized and what historical realities might that silence obscure? The issue is not simply, whether an artwork should be understood as beautiful or political, but how its beauty may participate in political meaning.
This tension is central to Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, painted in 1834 after the artist’s journey to North Africa (Figure 1). The painting presents three Algerian women seated in a decorated domestic interior, while a standing servant occupies the right side of the composition. This arrangement already creates a tension between stillness, intimacy and visual access. Nevertheless, its visual richness invites a formalist reading, such as the one developed by Sébastien Allard and Côme Fabre in “The Sphinx of Modern Painting”, which emphasizes Delacroix’s painterly language and atmosphere. Yet the work was produced only a few years after the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 and presents a private Algerian female space to a European viewer. For this reason, the painting also demands a postcolonial reading, such as Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s “Orients and Colonies: Delacroix’s Algerian Harem”, which is attentive to Orientalism, gendered spectatorship and colonial access. By comparing these two texts, this essay asks: how do formalist and postcolonial readings of Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment negotiate the tension between visual pleasure and colonial critique? I argue that the painting’s beauty does not stand apart from colonial ideology, rather, it becomes one of the means, through which colonial fantasy is made visually and emotionally persuasive.
Figure 1. Eugène Delacroix, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 1834. Oil on canvas, 180 × 229 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
(Picture taken from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_of_Algiers )
The first text examined is Allard and Fabre’s “The Sphinx of Modern Painting”, which offers a formalist-oriented reading. In the subsection “The Shades Interpenetrate Like Silks”, they frame Women of Algiers as a painting, in which the subject is partly displaced by the material and optical effects of paint itself. What is more, they note that nineteenth-century critics, such as Fernand Khnopff and Charles Blanc, perceived the work as having “nothing but paint”, suggesting that its significance lies less in narrative action than in colouristic and painterly experience. In this reading, Delacroix does not create drama through event or movement. Instead, the women are largely inactive and the scene appears inward, suspended and almost silent. What matters is the way the painting directs attention towards patterned tiles, folded fabrics, jewellery, cushions, garments, shadows and warm colour. Their emphasis, therefore, supports a formalist interpretation: meaning is produced not only by what the painting represents, but by how colour, surface and execution organize vision.
Nevertheless, their discussion of composition and colour strengthens this approach. Allard and Fabre describes, how passages of blue, red and yellow structure the painting, while contrasts between the servant’s dark skin and movement and the seated women’s pale flesh and immobility create a visual counterpoint. Their attention shifts analysis away from narrative content and towards the painted surface. The standing servant is not only a figure within the harem scene, but also a compositional device: her vertical position and movement balance the horizontal stillness of the seated women (Figure 2). Through this reading, the viewer’s slow movement across the canvas becomes less a matter of story than of painterly orchestration.
Figure 2. Annotated image of Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, showing the horizontal stillness of the seated women and the vertical counterpoint created by the standing servant.
Furthermore, Allard and Fabre’s formalist emphasis is useful, because it explains how Delacroix creates visual pleasure through the whole surface. They suggest that the sensuality of the work is not concentrated only in the female bodies, but distributed across fabrics, tiles, ornaments, skin, shadow and colour (Figure 3). Their reference to Cézanne’s statement that “the shades interpenetrate like silks” reinforces this idea: the painting becomes a chromatic field, in which objects seem to dissolve into a larger harmony. From this perspective, Delacroix’s achievement lies in making stillness visually intense and transforming the domestic interior into an atmosphere of sensory depth.
Figure 3. Annotated image of Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, showing how visual pleasure is distributed across fabrics, tiles, ornaments, skin, shadow and colour.
However, this emphasis also reveals the limitation of a formalist reading. By treating Women of Algiers primarily as a triumph of paint, colour and execution, Allard and Fabre risks separating beauty from its colonial and gendered conditions. This can be connected to Hatt and Klonk’s discussion of formalism, where formal analysis is valuable for understanding visual meaning, but restrictive, when form is treated as autonomous from historical or social structures. Allard and Fabre’s approach explains, how the work seduces the viewer, but leaves less room for questioning, what that seduction means historically. If the painting is discussed mainly as a spectacle of colour, the Algerian interior can appear as a timeless aesthetic space, rather than as a colonial construction. Formalism, therefore, reveals the visual intelligence of the painting, but not the colonial structure of looking that makes that pleasure possible.
The limits of this formalist approach become clearer, when placed beside Grigsby’s postcolonial reading. In “Orients and Colonies: Delacroix’s Algerian Harem”, Grigsby shifts attention from the painted surface to the colonial conditions that structure looking. She reads the painting as an image, produced within French colonial expansion in Algeria. Her analysis connects to Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, in which the “Orient” is not treated as a neutral geographical reality, but as a structure of Western knowledge, desire and authority. Through this lens, Grigsby asks not only what Delacroix saw, but how his painting organizes Algeria as an object of Western vision.
A central strength of Grigsby’s argument is her attention to the harem as a colonial and gendered space. She shows that the harem was not a neutral subject in nineteenth-century European visual culture. It functioned as a fantasy of forbidden access: a private female interior imagined as closed to European men, and therefore, charged with desire. Grigsby makes clear that Delacroix’s painting is more restrained than many later Orientalist harem images, because the women are not presented in openly theatrical or erotic poses. However, this restraint does not make the painting politically innocent. On the contrary, the quietness of the scene may make the fantasy of access more convincing. The women do not confront the viewer. Instead, their stillness allows looking without challenge. In this way, Grigsby interprets the painting as a structure of looking, in which the European spectator occupies a privileged and invisible position (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Annotated image of Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, showing the indirect gazes of the seated women, the psychological distance between viewer and figures and the private interior opened to view.
This marks an important difference between Grigsby’s postcolonial approach and Allard and Fabre’s formalist emphasis. This difference can be understood through Hatt and Klonk’s discussion of postcolonialism, where the task is not only to interpret images, but to ask, how representation is shaped by empire, cultural hierarchy and unequal relations of looking. Where a formalist reading may understand stillness as compositional balance or atmospheric calm, Grigsby asks, what kind of viewing relation that stillness produces. Her analysis shifts the question from “How is the scene painted?” to “Who is allowed to look and under what conditions?” The women are strongly present as visual forms, but they are not given full subjectivity. In Grigsby’s reading, intimacy is transformed into possession and visual access becomes a colonial fantasy.
Nevertheless, Grigsby also complicates authenticity. Delacroix’s journey to North Africa has often been used to distinguish his work from invented Orientalist fantasy. Because he travelled and observed, Women of Algiers may appear more truthful than images produced by artists who never visited North Africa. However, Grigsby challenges the assumption that direct observation guarantees neutrality. Seeing is never innocent, because Delacroix observed North Africa from the position of a French male artist moving within a colonial and diplomatic context. So, even if the painting includes observed details, such as garments, tiles, objects and spatial arrangements, these details are reorganized for a European audience. The important question is not simply, whether the painting is accurate, but what its accuracy does. So, Grigsby’s reading shows that realism can serve fantasy, rather than oppose it.
Through this approach, Grigsby reveals, what a formalist reading risks leaving aside. Allard and Fabre explains how Delacroix creates visual pleasure through colour, surface and composition, but Grigsby asks, what that pleasure means within a colonial context. Her postcolonial reading does not deny beauty, rather, it shows that beauty itself is part of the problem. The painting’s atmosphere, silence and intimacy are not separate from power. They help produce a mode of looking, in which Algeria becomes available to European contemplation.
Comparing the two approaches shows that each reveals a different aspect of Women of Algiers, while producing limitations. Allard and Fabre’s formalist emphasis explains, why the painting is visually powerful and prevents the work from being reduced to a political document alone. At the same time, Grigsby’s postcolonial approach questions the conditions, under which this attraction is produced. The painting does not need to show violence directly in order to belong to colonial history. Colonial power can also appear through quieter forms: aesthetic possession, the fantasy of entering a private space and the transformation of Algerian domestic life into an image for European contemplation. The strongest interpretation, therefore, is to read form and colonial critique together, since the politics of Women of Algiers operate through its beauty, rather than behind it.
This comparison also connects to broader methodological questions in art history. Hatt and Klonk’s discussion of formalism shows that formal analysis can reveal how images produce meaning visually, but becomes limited when form is treated as separate from social and historical power. Nevertheless, their chapter on postcolonialism develops the other side by emphasizing that representation is shaped by empire, cultural hierarchy and unequal relations of looking. D’Alleva similarly reminds that theoretical approaches do not simply provide different answers to the same artwork, they shape the questions that can be asked. Applied to Women of Algiers, Allard and Fabre and Grigsby construct different objects of study. For Allard and Fabre, the central object is Delacroix’s painted surface. For Grigsby, it is the colonial viewing relation produced through that surface. A stronger interpretation must bring these levels together.
In conclusion, formalist and postcolonial readings of Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment negotiate the tension between visual pleasure and colonial critique in different ways. Firstly, the formalist reading explains, how Delacroix creates pleasure through colour, composition, texture and atmosphere. Secondly, the postcolonial reading asks, what that pleasure does: how it turns a private Algerian female interior into an object of European vision, desire and possession. Nevertheless, the answer to the research question is that these approaches should not be treated as opposites. Formalism reveals how the painting seduces the viewer, while postcolonial critique reveals why that seduction is historically and politically charged. The painting’s significance lies in this uneasy relation: Women of Algiers shows that beauty can become one of the forms, through which empire imagines, organizes and possesses the world it represents.
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