Alphone-Etienne Dinet

Étienne Dinet was born into a relatively well-off and cultured family of lawyers.in Paris. Although his family encouraged him to follow the same path by studying law, he decided to enter the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1881. Shortly after, he left to join the the Académie Julian which was less academic than the Beaux-Arts.

Early on, he had the desire to stay away from the French Academicism and was attracted to the Realism found in paintings by artists such as Millet. The Impressionists also had a certain influence on him, particularly in the treatment of the light which shown in the paintings that he submitted in 1882 and 1883 to the “ Salon des Artistes Français”.

Dinet will discover Algeria in 1884, while joining a friend who was part of a group of entomologists on a mission. Then will returned to Algeria the following year, with art historian Gaston Migeon, who will later on promote Islamic Art for the Louvre‘s collection.

The artist settled definitely in Algeria in 1904, and bought a house near the Bou-Saâda oasis. The house had a patio with a view which allowed him to contemplate and paint the landscapes that werefascinating him. He also loved to paint the inhabitants of southern Algeria and the Sahara desert.

Dinet did not paint an Orient which was fantasized and dreamt of by his European colleagues but he tried to show and make visible the culture, rites and everyday life of this world to which he felt very close.

So close that Etienne Dinet, now Nasreddine, made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1929 before passing away.

Etienne Dinet is one of most important orientalist painters of his time and as a result the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre museum count a numerous number of his works among their collections of art.