Gustave Achille Guillaumet

Gustave Guillaumet's best-known picture, The Sahara in the Musée d'Orsay, is almost empty: the carcass of a camel in the foreground, a caravan, or perhaps a mirage of one, on the horizon, and bare desert in between. It was shown at the Salon of 1868 and admired by the writer Théophile Gautier.

Guillaumet, born in Puteaux near Paris in 1840, first travelled to Algeria in the early 1860s and went back many times, preferring the south and the life of the desert people. He painted everyday scenes there, women weaving, evening prayer, villages in the heat, and he wrote about them too. His texts appeared in the magazine La Nouvelle Revue between 1879 and 1884 and were collected after his death in 1887 as the book Tableaux algériens.