Man in a Large Hat

The straw hat is the first thing anyone sees. Its brim is wide enough to shade the man's shoulders, and it is patched with coloured shapes in orange, green and lilac. Under it, a white cloth wraps his head and chin, his face sits in shadow, and his eyes are turned to one side. Behind him there is only a flat, pale plain and a grey sky. Dinet painted him in 1901 on a small wooden panel, under 40 centimetres high, and signed and dated it in the lower corner. The French State bought it the following year. In 2023 the panel crossed the Atlantic for an exhibition at the Denver Art Museum called Near East to Far West, which hung French paintings of North Africa beside American paintings of the West and asked how both had pictured lands under colonisation.