Prosper Marilhat

In October 1831 a 20-year-old landscape painter from Vertaizon, a village in the Auvergne in central France, sailed east as the draughtsman on a scientific expedition led by Baron Karl von Hügel, an Austrian naturalist. The work lasted until May 1833 and took Prosper Marilhat through Greece, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Upper Egypt. He came home with 10 albums of sketches.

Those albums supplied the rest of his career. At the Salon of 1834 he showed "The Place de l'Esbekieh in Cairo", and the young writer Théophile Gautier said the sight of it made him ill with longing for an East he had never set foot in. The remark is still quoted alongside Marilhat's name. What he put on canvas was drier than that, mosque ruins, streets and palm trees measured out with an accuracy his contemporaries kept noticing.

Syphilis left him mentally unstable in his last years, and he died in 1847 at 36, having last shown at the Salon in 1844. He also went on painting closer to home, in Italy, Provence and his own region, and "Farmyard with Sheep", dated 1838, is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.