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sis resorts like Biskra (where Gustave Guillaumet and Charles Landelle painted in the 1870s and 1880s),

or they could, like Renoir, seek it out in the easy environs of Algiers itself.

The best-known of Renoir’s Algerine cityscapes is Arab Festival, Algiers: The Casbah (Fête arabe,

 Alger: La Casbah). Exhibited at the Society of French Orientalist Painters in 1895 as La mosquée à

 Alger and described as “a picturesque milling of Arab multitudes on uneven ground,”7 it was pur-

chased by Claude Monet in 1900. The occasion Renoir painted, never firmly identified, is a per-

formance by North African musicians (like those painted previously by Delacroix, Fromentin, and

Alfred Dehodencq). In the center of the canvas a ring of five male dancers in turbans and red caps

play tambourines and flutes before a large crowd. Such musicians were often hired to help celebrate

parties and some religious feasts. Local men, women, and even children are scattered across the nat-

ural amphitheater formed by the raw earth of the heights behind the Casbah—identifiable as the

crumbling Turkish ramparts (today built over) above the Jardin Marengo and the Bab el Oued quar-

ter of Algiers. Indigenous people mingle with a small number of European observers suggested by

black suits, hats, and occasional women’s bonnets. Below this terrain vague, the corner of bleached

domes and cubes appears to depict the precinct of the Mosque of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman looking down

to the blue sea. Thus the ancient buildings of “Algiers the White” help anchor this unconventional

composition.

Renoir probably considered the North African spectacle as a characteristic problem of pictorial

Orientalism: how to render the light and color of the exotic site. If so, he was true to the tradition of 

Delacroix’s painting and of Fromentin’s travel books. His son Jean, recalling that Renoir “discov-

ered the value of white in Algeria,” quotes him as saying, “Everything is white: the burnous they

wear, the walls, the minarets, the road. . . . And against it, the green of the orange trees and the grey

of the fig trees.”8

In that comment everything betokens the problem of the palette—the Algerianlocals matter most for the white they wear. In short, the colonial traveler, enjoying the fruits of his

country’s dominance, aestheticizes the colonized people, treats them as spectacle. That attitude re-

turns us to Monet’s construction of Algeria as a site of visual revelation and, still earlier, to Fro-

mentin’s description of the Orient as a site of “unclassifiable” experiences. Fromentin believed that

his canvases rarely met the challenge of painting such experiences, and neither perhaps did those of 

Renoir, who preferred the temperate Mediterranean zone in and around Algiers. In about 1880 Al-

giers boasted numerous sites where foreign landscapists could set up their easels to paint outdoors

with little risk of interference, provided they observed propriety and the view, rather than the figure,

was their subject (as Fromentin had recommended).Moorish architecture held great attraction for Renoir. Mosque at Algiers ( Mosquée à Alger; see Plate

3) was painted on his second trip. Many of the traditionally garbed figures (with the exception of a

wealthy-looking woman in a head-to-foot haik) are rendered wraithlike before the solidity of 

bleached Moorish architectural forms. Renoir’s picture shows one of the most venerated of all Al-

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 3 7