Khan in Algiers

A khan is a caravanserai, an inn built round a yard where travellers and their pack animals could stop for the night. Fromentin knew Algiers well. He first went to Algeria in 1846, returned the following year, and in 1852 settled near the city with his young wife for most of a year, the stay that became his book A Year in the Sahel.

The panel carries his signature but no date, and the firmest fact about it is a sale. On 27 April 1876 it was auctioned in New York with the collection of William Tilden Blodgett, a varnish manufacturer who had helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art and had died the previous November. That evening 93 paintings changed hands. Four months later, on 27 August, Fromentin himself died, near La Rochelle. By 1877 the panel belonged to James William Paige of Boston, who left it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1894.