Nasreddine Dinet

Most Orientalist painters visited the Muslim world as tourists and went home. Étienne Dinet stayed. Born in Paris in 1861 and trained in the French academic tradition, he first travelled to Algeria in 1884 and kept returning to the oasis town of Bou Saâda, on the edge of the Sahara, until in 1903 he made it his home.

He learned Arabic well enough to read and argue in it, and his paintings shifted away from the exotic spectacle his colleagues sold in Paris toward close, unhurried scenes of ordinary life in the town: its children, its evening light, its Quran schools. In 1913 he made his conversion to Islam public and took the name Nasreddine Dinet.

In 1929 he travelled to Mecca on the pilgrimage and wrote about it, and he died in Paris later that year. Following his own wish, he was buried in Bou Saâda, in the Muslim cemetery of the town he had painted for more than 40 years.