North African Landscape

In September 1847 Eugène Fromentin, aged 26, sailed back to Algeria for a second stay. He had been there briefly the year before. This time he remained eight months and went much further inland, to Constantine and on to Biskra, an oasis on the edge of the Sahara. He came home with a great mass of drawn and painted studies, many of which were still in his studio when he died.

The museum dates this small oil to that trip, about 1847 or 1848. It is painted on paper, which a traveller could carry and work on outdoors, and was later mounted on canvas. It is barely 17 centimetres high. A dusty road curves through low scrubby ground, a rider on a white horse comes towards us, and on the left the land drops to water below a long headland. Away to the right, thin columns of smoke rise from the fields.

Fromentin signed it along the bottom edge, Eug. Fromentin. Nothing is known of its history before 1970, when Maurice Goldberg of Boston gave it to the museum.