The Sahara (29 page)

A Brilliant Palette

“I will salute with a profound regret that menacing and desolate horizon which has so rightly been called-Land of Thirst.”

Eugene Fromentin

If nineteenth-century poets did not journey to North Africa, painters of the period did. The fact that such a trip could be costly and involved an element of danger was offset by the visual delights the travellers expected to find. The motivations that brought them to the Sahara were many and diverse. Like the poets, more romantically inclined painters could forget in North Africa the banality of European industrial modernity, finding the Sahara pristine by comparison. From the French invasions of Egypt in 1798 and Algeria in 1830, the region’s Ottoman territories were coming under varying degrees of European control, which made the decision easier for those bearing easels.

Because of uneven foreign occupation or control not all of the Sahara attracted painters. In those Saharan lands with a Mediterranean border, Libya received the fewest artist-travellers, not being colonized until the twentieth century. Morocco attracted more painters than Libya, although few travelled south of the Atlas Mountains. The number of visitors to Morocco was as nothing, however, compared with those who journeyed to Algeria and Egypt in the second half of the century. As for the southern Saharan nations, apart from those painters who followed the British Army to the Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania were left virtually undisturbed by foreign artist-travellers.

Before the political map of the Sahara was altered in favour of the Europeans, anyone wishing to travel there found that diplomatic protection was usually necessary. Invasion and occupation changed this, and opened up the Sahara to European and other artists. For many the impetus to travel to North Africa came about as a result of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.

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 minimization 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.