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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 Frenchformal 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-

 4 2 R e n o i r a n d I m p r e s s i o n i s t O r i e n t a l i s m