L'algérie De Gustave Guillaumet, 1840-1887

Exhibition at the Musée des beaux-arts, La Rochelle, 8 June - 17 September 2018 ;
Musée des beaux-arts, Limoges, 19 October 2018 - 4 February 2019 ;
at La Piscine, Roubaix, 8 March - 2 June 2019

Gustave Guillaumet is one of the leading figures of French Orientalism. Although his work is widely represented in many museums, in particular the Musée d'Orsay, and in the main exhibitions devoted to Orientalist painting in recent decades, it remains little known, and his critical fortune relative.He was, however, one of the first artists to have visited Algeria intensively, from Oran to Kabylia, from the High Plateaux to the oases and the Sahara.

This catalogue of the first exhibition devoted to the artist since 1899 studies the Algerian side of the French Orientalist, from an aesthetic, historical and cultural perspective, and offers a true revelation of this naturalist painter, who was madly in love with the wide open spaces and the inhabitants of Algeria at the beginning of the colonial yoke.