This drawing is a preparatory study for the "Arab Market on the Tocria Plain" in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille / Ce dessin est une étude préparatoire pour le "Marché arabe dans la plaine de la Tocria" conservé au Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille
This intensely expressive figure is a preparatory study for "Arab Market on
the Tocria Plain", a painting exhibited at the 1865 Salon and now in
the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille.
1. Gustave Guillaumet, a "Saharan" painter with
a passion for Algeria
Gustave Guillaumet was born into a family of
industrialists; this affluence allowed him to be financially independent
throughout his life, which was quite rare in the artistic circles of the time.
A student of François Edouard Picot (1786-1868) and Félix-Joseph Barrias
(1822-1907) at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Gustave Guillaumet exhibited his
paintings at the Salon from 1861 to 1880. He differed from most other
Orientalist painters by his deep knowledge of the Orient, and more specifically
of Algeria, which he discovered in 1862. He left for Italy after failing at the
Prix de Rome in 1861, but the bad weather on his way encouraged him to take a
boat to Algeria in Marseille.
Despite the malaria he caught there, which forced him
to spend three months at the military hospital in Biskra, he returned
enthusiastic about this country, where he went back a dozen times. He was the
only painter to visit the extreme south of Algeria at that time, and
particularly the Laghouat region, on the edge of the Sahara, which he
discovered in 1877.
As François Mouquin wrote in 2018 in the catalogue of
the exhibition devoted to Guillaumet: "his painting was not a simple genre
painting. It was the portrait of a culture, that of Algeria, whose light he was
able to master marvellously. He
translated those customs, those traditional activities and the patriarchal life
of this thousand-year-old civilisation, in a way which was better than any
other could have done and equivalent to that of an ethnologist."
Guillaumet died at the age of forty-seven on 14 March
1887 in his studio located at 5 Cité Pigalle. He was buried in the Montmartre
cemetery, where his grave has been decorated with a sculpture by Louis Barrias
(the brother of his teacher at the Beaux-Arts) depicting a seated young
Algerian woman.
2. The Arab market on the Tocria plain
This vast painting (211 x 342 cm) was exhibited
at the 1865 Salon, alongside Evening in the Sahara, south of Bou-Saâda,
another Saharan genre scene depicting a caravan stopover (whereabouts unknown).
Placed under a zenithal sun, this Market was presented in opposition to a
twilight view.
This market scene evokes an essential aspect of
life for the semi-nomadic populations of southern Algeria. Its location
probably refers to Ain Tokria, an archaeological site in the commune of
Khemisti on the Sersou plateau (some 100 km as the crow flies from the coast,
between Algiers and Oran). Still rather inhospitable at the time, this region
of extensive farming and cattle-raising was a major strategic zone between the
Tell and the Saharan Atlas. The motif was probably also inspired by the large
market held a little further east, in the Boghar region (Ksar el Boukhari),
which was an important trading place where shepherds and farmers were purchasing
cereals, dates, wool and sheep.
The frieze composition featuring hieratic
figures camped in a desert landscape is typical of the artist's work. In this arid
environment, crushed by the meridian light, the artist develops a restricted
chromatic range - the off-white of the burnous, the ochres of the earth, the
azure of the sky - enhanced by a few touches of vivid color.
These two paintings, which represent a
"pacified" vision of the "natives"[1] of
the Southern Territories, were well received at the 1865 Salon (one was bought
by the Beaux-Arts department, the other by the Emperor with his civil list) and
exhibited at the 1867 Universal Exhibition. Guillaumet took up the same subject
again in 1877[2],
radically renewing the composition with the addition of female figures, absent
from our first painting.
The study we are presenting is part of a rather
large corpus of drawings and painted studies documenting not only the Sersou
landscape, but also every figure, every gesture, and every group in the
painting, as in this study of Young Bedouin (for the figure in the
foreground, in the center of the composition).
The Arab butcher, on the left of the
composition, is much smaller in the painting than in our study, demonstrating
the artist's care in preparing the smallest details of his composition.
The painted depiction of our butcher differs
little from the preparatory study we present, except in the position of the
tripod used to display the pieces of meat on which he nonchalantly rests his
left wrist, a tripod which is located behind his legs in this preparatory study.
Moreover, in our drawing, the blade of the knife gripped in his right hand, combined
with the intensity of his gaze, lend him a terrifying quality, as if he were an
oriental version of a bloodthirsty Bluebeard, which contrasts with the debonair
physiognomy of the young man depicted in the painting.
3.
Framing
Our drawing is presented in an extraordinary frame:
probably 19th-century Italian and possibly Piedmontese, it is decorated with cubic
marquetry reminiscent of Andalusian craftmanship inspired by Mudejar art.