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By the sword and the plow: Theodore Chasseriau's Cour des Comptes murals and Algeria
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2004 by Peter Benson Miller
[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]
Although this mural has suffered a great deal, it is clear that two half-naked white women occupied the central portion of the composition. White captives taken at sea and spirited away into harems were virtually synonymous with the infamy of the Regency of Algiers, and the subject became a staple of visual representation. Vernet executed a canvas depicting the abduction of a swooning, half-clad woman by pirates in 1819. (133) Their plight served as an important rallying cry to justify the invasion of Algeria in 1830. (134) Even after the occupation of Algiers, white slavery remained an argument in favor of the ongoing campaign. In their Voyage pittoresque dans la Regence d'Alger, published in 1835, Emile Lessore and William Wyld depicted the former haunts of Barbary corsairs and the slave market in the Place Juba. The accompanying text congratulated the French for ridding Algiers of these slave traders. (135) Vacherot exhibited his picture of the slave market at the Salon of 1841. (136) Under the haughty gaze of a Turkish client, a white odalisque, naked apart from a white sheet drawn across her midsection, reclines in the foreground, immediately in front of a black woman with clasped hands. Prints deploring the slave trade, such as Vente d'esclaves from 1838 by Nicolas Eustache Maurin, featured the same repertory of characters: scantily dressed women supplicating their captors or prospective purchasers (Fig. 10). This racial contrast is central to the series of pictures set in the harem that Chasseriau painted after his return from Algeria. (137) In the mural, his juxtaposition of a black captive with her arms drawn up to her face and the defenseless white flesh of her fellow prisoners echoes the racial diversity of, and the positions assumed by Maurin's female slaves. It is above all in Chasseriau's adoption of the exposed and vulnerable back of the woman in the left of the lithograph for the central figures of his mural that suggests the imprint of the Barbary slave trade in The Return of the Captives. Chasseriau took Maurin's figure and duplicated her, giving the unbound hair cascading down her back to one of his faceless captives and the erotically charged drapery slung low across her naked hips to the other. (138)
Desirable female bodies such as these were as much a feature of imagery generated by the taking of Algiers as they were emblematic of the slave trade. Exotic women--whether "liberated" from their cloistered existence or taken as spoils of war--were paraded across popular prints in the 1830s that reenacted the conquest of Algiers within the titillating confines of the harem. (139) The connection between Chasseriau's female prisoners seen from behind in the Cour des Comptes panel and the harem as a symbolic site in the occupation of Algeria is reinforced by comparing the figures to those in the artist's imagery in which the connection to North Africa is more explicit. Chasseriau also chose the rear view for his Jewish Women on a Balcony (1849, Musee du Louvre). In 1856, Gautier likened Chasseriau's harem denizens to "captive barbarians brought back to our civilization," which is the same phrase he used to characterize the hostages at the Cour des Comptes.(140)
