53. Etienne Nasreddine Dinet (Paris 1861-1929) Jeune baigneuse assise près d'une fontaine (Charchar) signé 'E. DINET' (en bas à droite) huile sur carton signed 'E. DINET' (lower right) oil on board 39.5 x 25.4cm (15 9/16 x 10in). Provenance Private Collection, France, since 1950 Literature Denise Brahimi & Koudir Benchikou, La Vie et l'œuvre de Étienne Dinet, Paris, 1991, p. 229, n. 301, illustrated The painting is offered with the original certificate issued by the Expert Lynne Thornton, who examined the work on 12 January 1981. Pupil at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Etienne Dinet quickly moved away from history painting and contemporary life. In 1883, he discovered Algeria thanks to his painter friend Lucien Simon, and settled there permanently the following year. The love of North Africa and its people was so strong that he eventually converted to Islam in 1905, taking the name Nasreddine. In 1888, Dinet took important steps to solidify his growing interest in North Africa: he enrolled in formal Arabic classes at the Oriental Language School in Paris and returned to Algeria for a fourth time, accompanied by the young guide, Sliman Ben Ibrahim, with whom Dinet was to eventually live and collaborate with for many years. His knowledge of the Arabic language allowed him access to remote locations and enabled him to capture a more intimate portrayal of the life of North Africa. Dinet's work was displayed in the Algerian pavilion at the Universal Exhibition of 1889, where he would also win the silver medal for painting, and following this surge of publicity, Dinet helped found the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts along with thirteen other artists. In 1904, after spending many months of each year in Algeria, Dinet decided to create a more permanent base for himself in-country and bought a house in the southern Saharan city of Bou-Saada. Delving deeper into Orientalist themes with his work now spanning two continents, Dinet had a respected place among the desert culture he drew inspiration from. He was a stunning realist, focused more on the interactions between natives, representations of women and manifestations of the Muslim religion. Despite his numerous paintings of nude Algerian youths – he was, surprisingly, never wanting for indigenous models – Dinet's paintings lack the frank eroticism of his counterparts who illustrated an Orient full of reclining odalisques oozing sensuality. Employing the use of photography to capture the fleeting expressions of his models, Dinet's cinematic approach was far removed from the disengaged reserve of fin-de-siècle aesthetics which lent an air of theatricality. His landscapes lack exaggerated romanticism and his depictions of women, a favorite subject, hold no territorial claims over the eastern body seen through western eyes. With his conversion to Islam in 1908 and made formal in 1913, Dinet used his nudes to express a right to represent beauty as created by God, rather than the purely voyeuristic impressions of imagined, private moments. Shortly after making the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, Dinet died in his native France in 1929. Today in Bou-Saada, where he was eventually buried, The Nasreddine-Etienne Dinet Museum stands as a testament to Dinet's unique place in the history of Orientalist painters. Though later on in his career to be found behind the times by his peers, Dinet and his true understanding of Saharan life lend his works encapsulating the history and peoples of Algeria an authenticity rarely surpassed. The art critic Camille Mauclair predicted Dinet's staggering importance in the history of Orientalist painters: 'Later on, they (Dinet's canvases) will be incomparable references; they will have fixed without the coldness of archaeology a civilization and a race called upon to transform themselves to the point of travesty by the fatalities of a 'modernism' that is slowly killing the Orient.' By allowing his models to face forward rather than backward to suit the tastes of a time obsessed with antiquity, the work of Etienne Dinet acts as a rich cultural currency towards understanding a way of life now transformed yet far from forgotten.