Farmyard with Sheep

This small canvas is dated 1838, and by then Marilhat's name in Paris rested entirely on Egypt. Four years earlier the Salon had shown his view of a Cairo square, and the writer Théophile Gautier said it left him homesick for an Orient he had never set foot in. He had gathered that material on a scientific expedition through the Levant and Egypt in the early 1830s, filling ten albums with sketches. His French work carried on alongside it. In the same year as this farmyard he sent a view of the Pont du Gard to the Salon, and he was painting the rivers and hills of his native Auvergne. The vegetation here gets the same patient attention he had given palm trees. The picture later belonged to the Rotterdam shipowner Fop Smit and is now Dutch state property.