Ouled Naïl

The title names the sitter's people. The Ouled Naïl are a confederation of tribes from the Algerian highlands around Djelfa. Dinet shows one of their women seated on stone steps against a sunlit wall, her head resting on her hand. She wears a heavy headdress of gold plaques and pendants, a patterned dress of deep purple, and thick bracelets on both wrists. The painting's own history is a small map of how France has housed such pictures. Dinet sold it to the State in 1921, and it went first to the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, the national gallery for living artists. In 1935 it moved to the colonial museum at the Porte Dorée, built for the Colonial Exhibition of 1931. The Louvre took it over in 1968. Today it belongs to the Musée d'Orsay, which has lent it to the city's art museum in Toulon.