Gustave Guillaumet

Gustave Achille Guillaumet born March 26, 1840 in Puteaux (Hauts-de-Seine) and died in Paris March 14, 1887 is a French painter. Prominent figures of French orientalism who focus on renderings of light and atmosphere. However, although very present in many museums, in particular at the Musée d'Orsay, and in the main exhibitions devoted to orientalist painting of recent decades, his work remains little known, and his critical fortune relative. It marks a turning point in this artistic movement of the 19th century. A student of François Édouard Picot (1786-1868) and Louis-Ernest Barrias (1841-1905) at the École des beaux-arts in Paris, he exhibited at the Salon from 1861 to 1880. Guillaumet has just won second prize in Rome in 1862 when he had the opportunity to go to Algeria for the first time. He contracted malaria and had to spend three months in the Biskra military hospital. Nevertheless, fascinated by this country of adventure and change of scenery, he returned there nine times. His first works there were melodramatic in inspiration. He is one of the first artists to have visited Algeria intensively, from Oran to Kabylia, from the Hauts-Plateaux to the oases and the Sahara. His work, sometimes described as ethnographic, is also demanding and poetic, sensitive and serious. From 1872, he showed the humble existence of the desert populations whose way of life he adopted. Both in his paintings and in his writings, he describes the primitive and harsh life in the Algerian des…