Femme au vase

Having traveled to Morocco and Spain in the early 1890s, Besnard overwintered in Algiers in 1893-94. Like Delacroix decades before him, he was drawn to the sultry, closed interiors associated with the women's quarters. He was equally fond of Japanese prints; and he combined some of the organic, decorative motifs, flattened perspective and geometric partitioning of the surface found in them with a stifling orientalist compression of space to give us a modern French man's suspicious regard of women. Femme au vase foreshadows his famous etched series Elle (1900), in which an allegory of death is portrayed as a woman – probably one of the best pictorial essays on the notion of the femme fatale commonly held at the end of the nineteenth century.