The MFA Houston Just Bought a Long-Lost Delacroix Painting That Popped Up in a Paris Apartment

A masterpiece by 19th-century French painter Eugène Delacroix
(1798–1863), thought to be lost for close to 170 years, has joined
the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston.

Titled Women of
Algiers in Their Apartment (1833–34), it was purchased
for an undisclosed sum from Paris gallerist Philippe Mendes.

The painting is the first version of the artist’s famed
composition Femmes d’Alger (1834), now in the
collection of the Louvre in Paris and a highlight of the historic Delacroix
retrospective co-organized by the Louvre and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in 2018.

“After months of speculation about the destination of this truly
extraordinary painting, I am very pleased to say that Delacroix’s
first, long-lost Femmes d’Alger will have a public and
permanent home here in Houston,” said Gary Tinterow, the MFA’s
director, in a statement. “Women of Algiers in Their
Apartment is a landmark addition to our collections.”

The work will go on view at the museum on October 3.

The Louvre and MFA paintings were made by the artist during a
French diplomatic mission to North Africa after the French invasion
of 1830. The leader of the mission, Count Charles-Edgar de
Mornay, purchased the first version of the work and sold it at
auction 20 years later. After the 1850 sale, the painting passed
out of sight.

As it turned out, the picture was hiding in plain site in the
Paris apartment of an art collector who suspected the work was by
Delacroix, and called in Mendes to authenticate it in 2018.
Delacroix expert Virginie Cauchi-Fatiga authenticated it as a
signature Delacroix after extensive research and radiographic
study.

Delacroix’s six-month journey included a four-day stop in
Algiers, Morocco, where a port authority official invited him into
his home, offering a rare glimpse of the private lives of women and
their maidservants. During his short stay, Delacroix dashed off
numerous sketches and watercolors, capturing the details of the
architectural interiors and the clothing worn by these women.

The artist was the first painter to show scenes of North Africa
in the Parisian salon. “This makes a fine Orientalist painting
by Delacroix, a holy grail for collectors of his work,”
Tinterow told the New York
Times.

Upon his return to Paris, Delacroix painted the two versions of
the work, and a third, now in the collection of the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, France, was
finished in 1849.

The second and third paintings were both hugely influential on
artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Pablo
Picasso also made more than a dozen paintings, drawings, and prints
titled after Delacroix in 1954 and ’55.

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