The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has acquired a long-lost early version of Eugène Delacroix’s famed 1834 masterpiece, “Women of Algiers in Their Apartment,” that hangs at the Louvre in Paris.

The sumptuously colored 18-inch-high canvas , showing an elaborately dressed woman and a maidservant in a Moorish interior, had been in a Paris apartment until the private collector who owned it, suspecting it might be a Delacroix, reached out to the French art dealer Philippe Mendes in 2018.

His research revealed the work to have been owned by Count Charles-Edgar de Mornay. In 1832, the count led a French diplomatic mission to North Africa, and Delacroix, eager to experience the culture there, accompanied him. The painting disappeared from public sight when the count sold it at auction in 1850.

During Delacroix’s six-month journey, a port authority official in Algiers, who was a Muslim, took the unusual step of inviting the artist into his home and allowing him to sketch the women of his household . The reclining woman in the Houston canvas, painted a year after the visit, is derived from one of those studies. The slightly later, much larger Louvre canvas, painted in landscape rather than portrait format, includes two more female figures recorded in those sketches. That pioneering work, depicting an intimate North African subject on a monumental scale, was one of the star pieces in the 2018 Delacroix retrospective organized by the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.