Gustave Guillaumet

Gustave Guillaument (1840-1887)

Gustave Achille Guillaumet (26 March 1840 – 14 March 1887) was a French artist. He is best known for his paintings of North Africa.

Gustave Guillaumet was born in 1840 in Puteaux (now in the Hauts-de-Seine, Paris).

Guillaumet was initially a student of François-Edouard Picot and Félix-Joseph Barrias. In 1857 he joined the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he became a student of Alexandre Abel de Pụol.

In 1861 Guillaumet entered the Historical Landscape category of the Prix de Rome for a scholarship to study at the Academy of France in Rome. On failing to win, he instead travelled across the Mediterranean to Algeria, in north Africa. While there he contracted malaria and had to spend three months at the military hospital in Biskra.

Guillaumet visited Algeria ten times between 1861 and 1867. He preferred to travel in the south and many of his works depict the life of the people of the desert.

Whereas Orientalism generally gave a deliberately idealised or anecdotal picture of north Africa, Guillaumet's work was notable for portraying the harshness of life in a desert region. The Sahara features the carcass of a camel in the foreground with a caravan - or mirage of one - on the horizon and empty desert in-between. It was first exhibited to considerable success at the Salon of 1868.

Between 1879 and 1884 La Nouvelle Revue published tableaux of Algerian scenes collected together by Guillaumet. These were later published as a book, Tableaux Algériens. It includes twelve etchings by Guillaumet, Courtry, Paul Edmé Le Rat, Adolphe-Alphonse Géry-Bichard, August Müller and Toussaint; six photogravures by Dujardin and one hundred and twenty-eight engravings in relief from drawings and sketches by Guillaumet, himself. The book was published in 1888, after Guillaumet's death and is prefaced by a note on his life by Eugène Mouton.

In 1878, Guillaumet was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour, the highest decoration in France.

His son Gustave Guillaume (whose family name was changed), born in 1883, became a famous linguist.

Guillaumet died in Paris in 1887. Speculation about the circumstances of his death, supposedly of peritonitis, was published in The New York Times on April 6. The article claimed that Guillaumet had left his wife and son to live with "a lady who was his senior by many years" but that a few weeks before his death he had shot himself following an argument with his mistress. Guilaumet is buried in Montmartre Cemetery. His tomb bears a sculpture by Louis-Ernest Barrias of a Young girl from Bou Saâda, dropping flowers onto a portrait of Guillaumet embossed on a medallion.