Young Girl from Bou Saâda

Dinet signed this little portrait twice. At the top he wrote his name and the year, 1892, and lower down his name again with the place, Bou Saâda, an oasis town south of Algiers he kept returning to. The picture is on cardboard, barely 23 centimetres high. A girl looks out from under a pale veil, a red kerchief knotted over a dark cap. Between her brows sits a small green mark, the kind of tattoo many women of the region wore. Her dress is bright red, and the sunlit wall behind her is little more than dabs of cream and blue. The following year Dinet helped found the Society of French Orientalist Painters, which gave artists working in North Africa and the Middle East their own exhibitions in Paris. The portrait entered the national collections by bequest in 1970.