NASR'EDDINE ETIENNE DINET (1861-1929),
The Mzab Plateau (526m - 1,725ft)
Algeria (Sahara)
In Caravane se dirigeant vers Ghardaia (Caravan on the way to Ghardaia), oil on canvas
The formation
The Mzab plateau is a rocky formation whose altitude varies between 300 and 800 meters. The average altitude is 500 meters (Ghardaia: 526 meters).This relief, of which the origin is from the Upper Cretaceous, is in the form of a vast stony expanse and brown and blackish rocks. The grounds are limestone. Their roughly horizontal structure indicates that they have remained in place, away from the orogenic movements, since their formation.
The deepest valleys bordered by rocky cliffs with steep slopes have a gradient that rarely exceeds 100 meters in relation to the plateau.
The M'zab is therefore generally a flat region but where fluvial erosion, combined with the action of the desert climate, has created a multitude of superficial accidents that make communications most difficult.
Due to the low latitude and the moderate altitude, the temperature is very high in summer (absolute maximum in Ghardaia: 50 ° C), moderately cool in winter (absolute minimum: minus 1 ° C in Ghardaia). In winter as in summer, the diurnal variation of temperature is important, due to the perfect dryness of the atmosphere. For the same reason, the brightness is intense.
Sandwash from the southwest periodically accentuate the dryness of the climate. They are particularly frequent and violent in late winter and early spring.
The Mzab Valley is part of World Heritage since 1982, as an untouched example of a traditional human habitat perfectly adapted to the environment.
The painter
Nasr'Eddine Dinet (born as Alphonse-Étienne Dinet in Paris) was a French orientalist painter.
Compared
to modernist painters such as Henri Matisse, who also visited northern
Africa in the first decade of the 20th century, Dinet’s paintings are
extremely conservative. They are highly mimetic, indeed ethnographic, in
their treatment of their subject.
Dinet’s
understanding of Arab culture and language set him apart from other
orientalist artists. Surprisingly, he was able to find nude models in
rural Algeria. Before 1900, most of his works could be characterized as "anecdotal genre scenes".
As he became more interested in Islam, he began to paint religious
subjects more often. He was active in translating Arabic literature into
French, publishing a translation of an Arab epic poem by Antarah ibn
Shaddad in 1898.
Dinet
was born the son of a prominent French judge. From 1871, he studied
at the prestogious Lycée Henry IV in Paris, where the future president
Alexandre Millerand was also among the students. Upon graduation in 1881
he enrolled in the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and
entered the studio of Victor Galland. The following year he studied
under William Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury at the Académie Julian.
He also exhibited for the first time at the Salon des artistes français.
Dinet
made his first trip to Bou Saâda by the Ouled Naïl Range in southern
Algeria in 1884, with a team of entomologists. The following year he
made a second trip on a government scholarship, this time to Laghouat.
At that time he painted his first two Algerian pictures: les Terrasses de Laghouat (Laghouat Terraces) or Oued M’Sila après l’orage (Oued M'Sila after the storm).
He
won the silver medal for painting at the Exposition Universelle in
1889, and in the same year founded the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts
along with Meissonier, Puvis de Chavannes, Rodin, Carolus-Duran and
Charles Cottet. In 1887 he further founded with Léonce Bénédite,
director of the Musée du Luxembourg, the Société des Peintres
Orientalistes Français.
In 1903 he bought a house in Bou Saâda and spent three quarters of each year there.
He
announced his conversion to Islam in a private letter of 1908, and
completed his formal conversion in 1913, upon which he changed his name
to Nasr’Eddine Dinet. In 1929 he and his wife undertook the Hajj to
Mecca. The respect he earned from the natives of Algeria was reflected
by the 5,000 who attended his funeral on 12 January 1930 in Bou Saâda.
There he was eulogized by the former Governor General of Algeria Maurice
Viollette.
2019 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau