The Sahara

by Eamonn Gearon

  The artists who accompanied Napoleon, notably Dominique Vivant, Baron de Denon, were, among other things, given the task of producing topographical images of the country. Denon, one of Napoleon’s close associates, worked in Egypt between November 1798 and the following August, when he returned to France. Made the first director of the Louvre by Napoleon in 1801, Denon published his illustrated account of his time in Egypt the next year. Voyage dans la basse et la haute Egypte, or Journey in Lower and Upper Egypt, proved immensely popular and was a powerful draw for future traveller-artists, as was Luigi Mayer’s Views in Egypt, which came out the year before Denon’s book. Although less well known than Denon, Mayer had travelled in Egypt two decades before the French invasion as the official draughtsman to Sir Robert Ainslie, British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

  After these early diplomat-artists came the traveller-artists who, instead of producing a sanctioned body of work for official purposes, were free to paint subjects of their own choosing. At the vanguard of the not quite independent artists inspired by the Sahara was Eugene Delacroix. Born in the same year as Napoleon’s ultimately unsuccessful invasion of Egypt, Delacroix travelled to Morocco and Algeria in 1832 as the official artist accompanying a diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Morocco.

  At the time he received the invitation to travel as official artist Delacroix was already keen to visit North Africa, having read the poetry of Byron and Victor Hugo. Although he made just one six-month trip to the region, Delacroix was besotted with what he saw, writing of his experiences: “I am truly sorry for the artists gifted with imagination who can never have any idea of this virgin, sublime nature.. .I can only look forward with sadness to the moment when I shall leave forever the land of beautiful orange trees covered with flowers and fruit, of the beautiful sun, of the beautiful eyes and of a thousand other beauties.”

  Delacroix’s love of the spectacular in everything he saw during his travels led him to produce a dramatic body of North African-inspired work that tends towards the fantastic and allegorical, for example The Death of Sardanapalus (1827). He also filled his work with imaginary battle and hunting scenes, as seen in pieces such as Moroccan Military Exercises (1832), complete with terrified horses, or the animated Combat between the Giaour and the Pasha (1826), inspired by Byron’s 1813 poem, The Giaour, a Fragment of a Turkish Tale. Delacroix represented something of the acme of sensationalist Orientalist work, with many artists who travelled to North Africa after him tending towards more realistic representations of their subjects. Delacroix filled numerous notebooks with sketches while travelling in Morocco and Algeria, allowing him to sketch rough drafts often with watercolour notes, but his larger works were all completed in his studio in France. At home he would often use models dressed in local costumes, which he bought on his travels.

  David Roberts, The Simoon in the Desert, 1838

  By the time David Roberts (1796-1864) set off for the Holy Land and Egypt in 1838, he was confident that his efforts would meet with financial success, so well received was the work of earlier artists, such as Delacroix. In eleven months Roberts travelled extensively in Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Lebanon, drawing en route virtually every tomb and temple he came across. On his return to England, he published, to great acclaim, six volumes of lithographic reproductions of these drawings. Although an already known painter, these lithographs, images of a land that was largely unknown to the British public, secured Roberts’ longer-term fame and financial success.

  Visiting Egypt, William Thackeray echoed Roberts’ view of the potential financial rewards to be made drawing in the region. Writing in 1844 during the course of his trip to the Middle East, the novelist appeared positively envious of the artist when he wrote, “There is a fortune to be made for painters in Cairo... I never saw such a variety of architecture, of life, of picturesques, of brilliant colour, of light and shade.”

  Algeria at around this time was proving a popular destination for artists, especially after the capture of Abd al-Qadir made the country feel safer from a European perspective. The scene of the capture of Abd al-Qadir was famously recreated by Joseph-Louis-Hippolyte Bellange in his imagined if not imaginatively entitled piece, Capture of the Retinue of Abdel-Kader in 1843.

  Fromentin and the Orientalists: “Dangerous Novelties”

  Yet as early as the 1850s, artists were complaining that the cities of the north coast were not “authentic” enough for their purposes of exploring new lands, so many Europeans having already settled there. With this in mind, they started heading further south, deep into the Sahara. As Guy de Maupassant wrote: “The moment you step onto African soil, a strange need takes hold of you: to go further south ... The south! That quick, burning word: south! Fire!”

  It was this south that attracted the poet and painter Eugene Fromentin (1820-76), whose critical success greatly promoted the cause of Orientalist art. Having discovered the Sahara for himself, Fromentin challenged his fellow artists to leave their studios and travel in order to paint the “dangerous novelties” that he believed one could only grasp through first-hand knowledge of the desert. As he wrote in his journal:

  The East is extraordinary, it gets away from conventions, it upsets the age-old harmonies of the landscape. I am not speaking of a fictitious East, I am talking of that dusty, whitish country, rather crudely coloured when it does have colour, with rigid shapes, generally broad rather than lofty, unbelievably dear with nothing to soften it, almost without an atmosphere and without distance.

  Fromentin made good use of desert landscapes as a result of his three journeys to Algeria between 1846 and 1853, and Egypt in 1869, where he went for the opening of the Suez Canal. As well as his artistic output, Fromentin made a literary reputation for himself with works such as A Summer in the Sahara (1857) and A Year in the Sahel (1859). The first of these recalls Fromentin’s journey south to the oasis of Laghouat, which featured in a number of his paintings.

  Fromentin’s advice to travel was seized upon by Gustave Guillaumet, with both artists bringing to life the harshness of the desert and its risks to their work. Fromentin and Guillaumet were both trained as landscape artists, a skill they used to great effect in their Saharan output, their brushes removing some of the more fantastic elements that had worked their way into pieces by earlier artists. Increasingly accurate scenes are evident in Land of Thirst from 1869, or Guillaumet’s 1867 painting, The Sahara. Neither of these pictures offers an idealized image, presenting viewers instead with unrelentingly grim aspects of death and dying in the desert.

  Fromentin painted at least two versions of the Land of Thirst, a title which echoes the closing words of one of his memoirs, A Summer in the Sahara: “I will salute with a profound regret that menacing and desolate horizon which has so rightly been called - Land of Thirst.” The scene shows the ordinary tragedy of a man’s death in the desert and is a long way from the romantic horsemen and colourful robes of Delacroix. While mirroring Theodore Gericault’s Wreck of the Medusa, its setting is not an ocean but a barren landscape of rock and sand. The men, who have become separated from a caravan that had provided them with some security, lie abandoned on rocky ground, beyond despair, waiting for death. The raised arm of one of the men perhaps shows a last gesture of defiance in the face of death, with the sun overhead and raptors circling patiently.

  In The Sahara, also known as The Desert, Guillaumet likewise produced a work that did not pander to the usual western preconceptions. Devoid of dunes, the geography consists of little beyond some mountain peaks, placed definitively beyond easy reach, and the merest hint of a caravan, too far away for comfort. Those elements aside, there is little for the eye to linger on; no trees for shade, no water burbling in a spring-fed oasis, but instead a vast, flat, featureless plain typical of much of the Sahara. The main focus is a camel’s carcass that dominates the foreground, melding a traditional memento mori motif with a Saharan icon. The dramatic use of light and the minimi
zation of colours, bleached by the sun like the camel’s carcass, make the painting reminiscent of Turner’s masterful use of light and colour.

  Guillaumet’s time in the remote southern reaches of Algeria led him to sympathize with the local environment to a greater extent than many of his fellow Europeans. He especially hated the development of the country, which he referred to as “Frenchification”. As he wrote with a certain melancholy, “Life here no longer seems as before, held together by dreams and bringing life to the shadows.” Ironically, had it not been for the French invasion, Guillaumet would probably not have had the opportunity to travel to the country he came to love and, to an extent, idealize because of what he saw as its alien otherness. During his initial visit to the Algerian interior he contracted malaria, from which he never fully recovered. His first bout of the sickness forced him to spend three months recovering in the military hospital at Biskra, an oasis he would subsequently return to frequently.

  Because of Guillaumet’s encouragement, Etienne Dinet made his own journey to the Sahara. While there he learnt Arabic and converted to Islam, taking the name Nasr’Eddine Dinet, before settling virtually full-time in the oasis of Bou Saada from 1903 until his death on Christmas Eve, 1929. Though his output is quite distinct from that of Fromentin and Delacroix, who worked very much with European audiences and markets in mind, Dinet is an artistic reactionary compared with Matisse and the Impressionists who travelled to North Africa after him. Dinet was, like Delacroix, devoted to reproducing accurately the garb and accoutrements of the people he encountered and showed a greater respect for his subjects than many of his fellow artists who hardly registered the differences in ethnicity and costume from one area of the desert to another.

  Typical of this realism is The Snake Charmer (1889). Painted in Laghouat, it shows an elderly, bearded snake charmer at the centre of the picture with a benevolent smile on his face and a snake on top of his head, with another held between his right thumb and forefinger. In the expressions of the semi-circle of spectators the viewer sees an array of emotions, including awe, fear, concern and pleasure. The faces of the men and boys who have gathered for the show are so beautifully observed that although it is taking place in a public arena, Dinet creates a sense of the intimacy of a private encounter.

  Like Dinet, Fromentin and Guillaumet also drew inspiration from daily life in Saharan oases. The slice of life in Fromentin’s A Street in El Aghouat (1859) is clearly based on first-hand experience. A common enough scene, the picture shows half a dozen men doing their best to rest while hiding from the heat, recumbent in the midday shade that barely covers a portion of the village street, dividing the public space into two distinct spheres of light and dark. Another ordinary scene captured by Guillaumet is that of a group of women drawing water in The Seguia, Biskra (1884), an image which has essentially remained unchanged since the oasis was settled in Roman times. Other scenes of daily life inspired Guillaumet to paint Saharan Dwelling, Biskra District, Algeria (1882) and Laghouat, Algeria (1879), studies of such mundane activity as the preparation of food. In Evening Prayer in the Sahara (1863) by Guillaumet, the figures of the group of worshippers in various stages of prostration during sunset prayers bring the divine into the Sahara, as behind them the smoke rises from the campfires.

  The American artist Frederick Arthur Bridgman (1847-1928), sometime student of French painter and sculptor Jean-Leon Gerome, spent a number of winters in Egypt and Algeria during the 1880s, both on the coast and in the Sahara. A native of Alabama, Bridgman had seen slave markets first-hand in his home state before the American Civil War. As a result, he became a committed anti-colonialist, sympathies he transfers to the downtrodden North African locals, for instance in the affectionately executed Interior of a Biskra Café, Algiers (1884). Although eventually settling in France, he continued to paint Algerian scenes which became, perhaps because of the distance and a faulty memory, increasingly saccharine, taking on the look of syrupy illustrations for a children’s edition of the Arabian Nights.

  In stark contrast to Bridgman’s chocolate-box period, the dramatic almost featureless landscapes by Guillaumet and others proved inspirational to Leon Belly, who created one of the most famous desert scenes of the nineteenth century in Pilgrims Going to Mecca. Although almost as much a part of the landscape as the stones and sand itself, until this time camels were not the first choice of artists painting Saharan scenes. This changed, however, when Belly’s painting was unveiled in 1861. It is not hard to see why this epic work, which measures almost eight feet by five, has become a classic of its genre.

  Unlike romanticized images, Belly’s painting offers an altogether more realistic, indeed sympathetic, portrayal of pilgrims as individuals, rather than a group of stereotypes. The elderly and the exhausted feature with the heat and blinding light - all elements given equal weight in the tableau. The believers are marching in the heat with the sun at their back forcing the picture’s detail into the dark places. The placing of the pilgrims too, looming front and centre, lends grandeur to the group of otherwise ordinary people. The seemingly infinite column of pilgrims forms a pyramid that reaches the top of the picture and back away across the endless plain, again devoid of soft colours or shade.

  Léon Belly, Pilgrims Going to Mecca, 1861

  Where Belly led, many followed. At a brush-stroke, the camel caravan became not only acceptable as a subject, but de rigueur, virtually every artist who portrayed camels after Belly was in his shadow. Ludwig Hans Fischer’s (1848-1915) treatment of the subject is beautifully shown in a pair of paintings, An Arab Caravan and An Arab Caravan at Dusk (1903). The first of these in particular creates a sense of heat, but both works impart that extreme stillness that is only found in the desert, where even the camel’s padded feet seem to have been designed to maintain this silence.

  In contrast to these tranquil scenes, Fischer also produced an extremely animated work in The Simoom (1878), a study of a sandstorm. The presence of an ancient statue, suggesting the possibility of nearby water, is the only thing that prevents this from being an image of pure terror. The picture of men battling through a storm, accompanied by their distressed sheep and a lone donkey, is uncomfortably realistic. Adverse weather is also the subject of Fromentin’s Windstorm on the Esparto Plains (1864), which features, for Fromentin, an uncharacteristically dark sky, the greys adding to the storm’s menace. Apart from the storm, the picture’s focus is the discomfort of a group of horsemen, caught on the plains with no shelter in sight, as their burnouses billow about their heads.

  After camels, the animal that features most prominently in Saharan art is the horse. In 1851 the French general Melchior Dumas published Horses in the Sahara, aided by the exiled Abd al-Qadir. The book is a study of animal husbandry and the uses and treatment of horses in the West versus North Africa. Fromentin and others seized upon the book as invaluable source material.

  In Moroccan Horsemen in Military Action (1832) by Delacroix, the majesty of the horses is tempered by the fear in their eyes as they take their mounts into battle. Horses also feature prominently in the work of Gerome (1824-1904). In setting the standard for documentary realism commonplace by the second half of the nineteenth century - Gerome was disparaged by many who came after him as cold and static, especially by the Impressionists, who favoured a freer, more interpretive approach in their work. In Arabs Crossing the Desert (c. 1870), Gerome places a noble looking group of horses and riders directly in front of the viewer, with camels relegated to the background as little more than set dressing. The view he offers is that while camels may be the more useful animals for a desert crossing, the horse is endowed with greater nobility. The all-male setting, devoid of any hint of domesticity, likewise promotes masculinity in the imagined nobility of his desert-dwelling Arabs. Adding to the romance of what might otherwise be considered a realistic scene is the riders’ garb, the rich, dust-free clothes shining out in contrast to the dun-coloured landscape surrou
nding them.

  The portrayal of women in the general field of Sahara-inspired Orientalist art usually involves the convention of shrouded or naked forms. In the paintings of the nineteenth century, women are rarely depicted in harems - more commonly associated with palaces found in the major urban centres such as Constantinople or Cairo, and thus absent from the Sahara proper. The questionable taste of many fantasy images of bondage and eroticism in many of these scenes no doubt contributed to the wholesale devaluation of Orientalist art as a genre.

  For examples of a more restrained, even respectful portrayal of women in the region, one could look to Morning Walk by the Italian Rubens Santoro, or Women in Biskra Weaving a Burnoose (1880) and Portrait of a Kabylie Woman (1875), by Bridgman. None of these shows the female subjects in a demeaning light; instead they are almost shying away from the more salacious harem portraits of other so-called Orientalists. Portrait of a Kabylie Woman in particular portrays a subject whose strength and single-mindedness are clear in her face, in contrast to the naked, pale-skinned women examined in a slave market or waiting in a harem.

  In this regard, The Almeh’s Admirers (1882) by Leopold Carl Muller and Gerome’s The Dance of the Almeh (1866) are far more sexually straightforward images, both pictures featuring the Almeh dancing for an all-male audience. Literally a learned woman, in reality an Almeh was a dancer who would often also work as a prostitute. In Muller’s piece, the dancer, who is staring directly at the viewer, seems unaware of her audience who are focusing on one or another of the woman’s curves, laughing or, in the case of the musicians, concentrating on their work.