Gustave Guillaumet

A student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, en route to Rome in 1862 Guillaumet suddenly changed his mind at Marseilles and sailed for North Africa instead. He was particularly drawn to Algeria, and the lives of the nomadic peoples he found in the desert there.

Over the years he returned to Algeria and Morocco over and again. His Orientalist subjects were enthusiastically received in Paris. Indeed, he is said to have been considered the Orientalist Jean-François Millet, combining naturalism and exoticism in equal measure.