Both Eugene Delacroix's painting Women of Algiers in Their Apartment of 1834 and Charles Baudelaire's prose poem, "Beautiful Dorothea" can be understood in terms of Baudelaire's comment in the Salon of 1859 that "a fine painting should be produced like a world . . . each layer heightening the reality of the dream bringing it nearer to perfection." Each artist creates his work as both a dream and a reality by a layering of contrasts, most generally that of reality and dreamscape, but also interior and exterior, viewer and viewed, individual and environment, light and dark, contrasting rhythms, and finally action and stasis. In creating these layers in both content and form, both Delacroix and Baudelaire construct works of art which become worlds unto themselves, with their own truths and limits, worlds where oppositions are blurred and recreated on the artist's own terms.
Both Delacroix's painting and Baudelaire's poem are distinctly foreign and are visions of the Orient and its women. For these artists the Orient is both a European dream and a historical reality, as evidenced by the form and content of their works. Baudelaire references the Opera Ball and old Kaffir women, and Delacroix titles his painting with a specific place which he visited to locate each work in a specific historical setting at a certain time and place, but they also portray the setting in a dreamlike manner. The diction Baudelaire uses in "Beautiful Dorothea" conveys a multeity in unity that situates the world of the poem somewhere above or below reality. Phrases such as "direct and terrible," "delicious death," "her red umbrella, filtering the light, rouges her face with a bloody glow," and "in harmony, she moves along, glad to be alive, smiling an empty smile," all serve to support the meaning and mood of this poem as slightly sour, positioning "Beautiful Dorothea" in a dream where these words would make sense and come together.
