Which French painter inspired Picasso's series 'Les Femmes d'Alger'?

Pablo Picasso’s series *Les Femmes d’Alger* was inspired by the French painter Eugène Delacroix.

Delacroix’s 1834 painting *The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment* provided Picasso with the direct model. Picasso began his variations in December 1954 and developed the project into 15 paintings, conventionally identified from Version A through Version O, along with numerous drawings and related works.

The series was not a straightforward copy. Picasso repeatedly broke apart and reconstructed Delacroix’s interior scene using shifting viewpoints, compressed space, and increasingly Cubist forms. He was also responding to Henri Matisse, whose death shortly before the project began affected Picasso deeply; Matisse’s odalisque imagery helped shape the series’ visual atmosphere.

A common mix-up is to name Matisse because he influenced the subject’s decorative and odalisque qualities. However, Delacroix is the painter whose specific composition inspired the series. Picasso’s Version O, completed in 1955, later became especially famous for its record-setting auction sale.