'Gustave Guillaumet belonged to the generation of naturalist painters devoted to the problems of light and atmosphere. But more important, he was the turning point in nineteenth-century Orientalism. His descriptions, in writing and painting, of the primative and austere life in the Algerian desert came at a moment when there was a great interest in France in the Algerian population.' L. Thornton, The Orientalists Painter-Travellers, 1828-1908 Paris, 1983, p. 146.