Changing perceptions of life in Algeria, as seen in the work of two nineteenth-century writer-painters: Eugène Fromentin and Gustave Guillaumet

Abstract

ABSTRACTLike Eugène Fromentin, Gustave Guillaumet, his junior by 20 years, was a distinguished Orientalist painter and writer. Fromentin, in some of his major paintings, revisited themes that he had treated earlier in his travel writings, Un été dans le Sahara (1854) and Une année dans le Sahel (1857). Conversely, Guillaumet revisited some of his earlier paintings in serialised essays, published as “Tableaux algériens”, in La Nouvelle Revue of 1880; these texts were republished posthumously in book form, with illustrations, in 1888. The differing approaches of these two peintres-écrivains are central to the evolution of word–image relationships in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their work, at one level, was intended to track the military progress of the French colonial army in Algeria and, at another level, to evoke details of daily life in the sedentary and nomadic peoples of that country. In so doing, they testify to the greatness of nineteenth-century French Orientalist painting, in terms of visual perspective, while, at the same time, heralding its decline, inasmuch as excessive accuracy of representation came dangerously close to ethnography, as opposed to art – a danger signalled by Duranty, in La Nouvelle Peinture (1870), and later by Fromentin, in Les Maîtres d’autrefois (1876).