The Day after Ramadan

The day after Ramadan is the first day of Eid al-Fitr, the feast that ends the month of fasting. Dinet shows a crowd of men in white burnouses and headcloths moving towards us in a slow column, some with their eyes lowered. White wool fills almost the whole canvas. Only one young man near the centre wears a dark cloak with gold embroidery over his robes, and a strip of red patterned cloth hangs at the side of the nearest figure. Look at the two top corners. In one, Dinet signed and dated the canvas in 1895. In the other, he wrote the name of the town, Laghouat, in Arabic script. The French State bought the painting in 1896 for the Musée du Luxembourg, the Paris museum of living artists, so this crowd on a Muslim feast day entered the national collections within a year of being painted.