enoir continues to approach the women in Algeria in his two companion paintings entitled Staircase, Algiers (1882). In the first of the set, Renoir presents the staircase of the mosque as a focal point, littered with Algerians meandering up and down the steps. It is as if, unsatisfied with the lack of subjects to paint at the front of the mosque, he has circled around it and looked to the occupants who ascend and descend the staircase. Luckily for Renoir, this quest for models pays off; in the foreground, a veiled woman gazes at us, mysterious yet beautifully alluring. Benjamin declares this woman’s presence “rather incidental” and instead focuses on the “lavished attention on [the] detail” of the building (Benjamin, Renoir 56). Indeed, Renoir’s care in depicting the mosque is quite significant: the staircase seems to invite us to enter this Algerian edifice and gives us a “backdoor” view of Islamic culture. We are tempted to say that Renoir has come a long way from his scene at the Casbah: his figures clearly identify with Algeria as they come and go from prayer, dressed in modest Islamic clothing on the steps of the well-detailed mosque. But in fact, inspecting Renoir’s second Staircase, Algiers reveals that the woman in the foreground is anything but “incidental,” as Benjamin puts it (Benjamin, Renoir 56), and instead epitomizes Renoir’s superficial approach to Algeria. In this second painting, the mosque of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman 
almost disappears behind lush foliage and several figures occupy the canvas, with the veiled woman in the forefront. It appears that several men loiter in the background, but the only figures that are clearly presented are two women, Renoir’s preferred subjects. Indeed, as with the Mosque at Algiers, we see that Renoir has cropped the architectural significance in favor of the woman, as photographs illustrate. Once again, the large minaret is missing, and the dome of the mosque barely peeks out of the corner of the painting. In addition, the detailed architecture of the first painting fades away in a wash of white. This is all to bring more focus on the woman in the foreground, who peers at us through her veil, questioning us and forbidding us to know more about her. Renoir once said that “an eye half-seen through a veil becomes really alluring” (Benjamin, Renoir 82). With this description, Renoir objectifies the elusive Algerian models, projecting onto them a mysterious beauty. However, this woman, sitting outside a mosque fully veiled, would not have meant to be a spectacle. She is not sitting there, dressed in that way, to shyly gaze at a Frenchman while he paints her. And yet Renoir places her in the center and studies her in his traditional style. He has essentially come full circle: his path from Odalisque to the Casbah to the mosque has led him back to his fixation with Arab women. Perceiving Algerian culture only through Algerian women, he did away with anything that might block his path to his long-desired models.
Images: Renoir, Auguste. Staircase, Algiers. Private collection.
Renoir, Auguste. Staircase, Algiers. Private collection.