Gustave GUILLAUMET (1840-1887) Lot n° 77

Portrait of a Tuareg with a turban Oil on canvas located and dated "Sidi Embarek, 1864" in the lower right corner. Inscription and signature on the back. Dimensions: 40 x 31,5 cm Provenance: Fulchiron estate, Monte Carlo. French painter born in Puteaux, he is one of the great French orientalists of the 19th century, focusing on light and atmosphere. A student of Picot and Barrias at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, he exhibited at the Salon from 1861 to 1880. In his paintings as well as in his writings, he describes the primitive and rough life in the Algerian desert, at the time when a great interest for the Algerian populations was born in France because of their political and economic rapprochement. Gustave Guillaumet was one of the first artists, including Eugène Delacroix with his famous painting Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, to penetrate the intimate space of Algerian women and to reveal a portrait that was much more real than the numerous harem fantasies that prevailed at the time. This visionary artist knew how to take a lucid and frank look at the beginnings of colonization, the epidemics and the famine that brutally struck between 1866 and 1869, by producing works that are far from the clichés of many orientalist painters. Guillaumet is buried in Paris in the Montmartre cemetery, his tomb is decorated with "La Fille de Bou Saâda", a bronze statue by Louis-Ernest Barrias depicting a young Algerian woman seated with her arm raised, throwing a few petals at the medallion portrait of the artist.