Pilgrims Going to Mecca

When this canvas went to the Salon of 1861, one critic wrote that visitors came home feeling they had travelled with the caravan. Belly sets the column of pilgrims walking straight at us across the desert, the long shadows of the camels stretching over the sand toward the front of the picture. Another critic, writing in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, grumbled that the group was too tightly packed and the camels too big for the people riding them. The Musée d'Orsay points to a quieter detail further back on the left. A man on foot walks beside a donkey carrying a woman and a child, a group that recalls the Holy Family's flight into Egypt, placed inside a Muslim pilgrimage. The state bought the painting from Belly that year, and from 1949 to 1968 it was lent to the Paris museum of France's overseas territories.