Evening Prayer in the Sahara

Guillaumet was 23 when he sent this to the Paris Salon of 1863. It came out of his first stay in Algeria the year before, a trip that left him three months in a military hospital at Biskra with malaria. France had been at war in Algeria, and ruling it, for more than 30 years by then. The canvas is three metres wide, and most of it is sky. Beneath it a desert camp stops for the prayer at sunset, the Maghrib. Men in white robes bow with their foreheads to the ground, one figure stands with both arms raised, and smoke from the evening fires climbs straight up behind the tents. The State bought the picture at the Salon that same year.