The Sahara (The Desert)

Guillaumet signed and dated this canvas in 1867, a year when Algeria was sliding into disaster. Drought, locusts and cholera had been spreading since 1866, and the famine that followed, at its worst in the winter of 1867 to 1868, killed hundreds of thousands of Algerians. Guillaumet faced it head-on two years later, in a huge Salon picture of starving people that now belongs to the museum in Constantine. Here he shows almost nothing. A camel carcass lies on bare, stony ground in the foreground, and far away on the horizon a small caravan sits in the glow of a low sun. Between them there is only flat desert. The picture went to the Salon of 1868, and his family gave it to the State in 1888, a year after his death.