Sisters Working in Our Fields. c.1858-60. Watercolour and gouache on paper. 9 7/8 x 18 1/8 inches (25 x 46 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of the author.
The scene shown in this watercolour is taken from the Bodichon's Moorish-style villa in Algiers that they purchased on their marriage, the Campagne du Pavillon, on Mustapha Supérieure that overlooked the Bay of Algiers. The house offered a magnificent view of the city, the underlying plain and the sea as can be seen here. Two Catholic nuns are seen working in the fields in the foreground. A number of orders of Catholic nuns were active in Algiers in the mid-nineteenth century, primarily as missionaries and teachers. Unlike Bodichon's earlier watercolours of the 1850s painted with Pre-Raphaelite precision, her technique has already started to broaden in this work, one of her earliest Algerian landscapes. This may be the result of the decreased contact with friends who were members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle such as Anna Mary Howitt. As observed by Deborah Cherry, watercolours such as this, although part of Bodichon's effort to create a feminist relationship with Algeria, cannot escape a connection with Orientalism's objectification of the exotic (Marsh and Gerrish Nunn, 104).
Bibliography
Marsh, Jan, and Pamela Gerrish Nunn. Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists. Manchester: Manchester Citiy Art Galleries, 1997, cat. no. 4, 104.
Created 1 February 2025