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Alfred Couverchel (1834-1867)
Alfred Couverchel was one of the most gifted French Orientalist painters of the Second Empire, a favored pupil of Horace Vernet whose desert scenes and equestrian compositions were collected by Napoleon III himself, before his sudden death cut short a brilliant career at only thirty-three.
He painted where the army marched, under a light Paris had never seen, and brought that light home in his baggage.
| 1834 | 1851 | 1857 | 1861 | 1867 |
| Born at Marseille-le-Petitin the Oise | École des Beaux-Artsunder Horace Vernet | First SalonMorocco, Algeria, Syria | The SaharaLaghouat and Ouargla | Dies at Le Vésinetaged thirty-three |
Constantinople with Vernet in 1854 · illustrations for Le Tour du Monde
National Museum of Algiers / Bought by Napoleon III
A listed artist
He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1851 and studied under François-Édouard Picot and, above all, under Horace Vernet (1789-1863), the great painter of battles and North African scenes, who took him as one of his favored pupils. In 1854, when Napoleon III sent Vernet to Constantinople to record the events of the Eastern War, the master brought his young disciple with him. The East had entered Couverchel's life, and it would never leave it.
His painting of the capture of the rebel chief Mohamed Ben Abdallah, executed on the spot in 1863 by authorization of the Governor of Algeria, is held today in the national museum of Algiers. Napoleon III bought several of his canvases for the imperial palaces. He exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1857 and contributed illustrations to the travel journal Le Tour du Monde.
The Lure of the Sahara
From his first Salon in 1857, Couverchel exhibited scenes of Morocco, Algeria and Syria. But it was the desert itself that drew him. In 1861 he traveled deep into the Algerian Sahara, following the military columns toward the oases of Laghouat and Ouargla.
Among the subjects he found in the Algerian South was the wedding camel, the dromedary harnessed for a marriage procession, draped in cascades of colored wool fringes and crowned with a tall canopy of ostrich plumes. It is a subject that belongs to the desert itself, and no studio in Paris could have invented it.
What to Look For
Couverchel does not draw a harness detail by detail. He sets the fringes moving in quick, sure strokes, so that the whole trapping seems to sway with the animal's walk. Look at the feet as well. The beast is caught mid-stride, one foot placed before the other, the load still in motion. A painter working from a studio model puts the animal at rest.
The shadows are the surest test. The light comes low and from the side, throwing a long shadow across the sand, which is the light of late afternoon and not the flat glare of noon that an invented East tends to borrow. The sky is a pale turquoise rather than the deep conventional blue, and the hills behind are olive and khaki, dry, without the picturesque vegetation a Paris studio would have added.
His manner belongs to a movement we describe separately, in our page on Orientalism.
Biographical information compiled from the Musée d'Orsay, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the municipal archives of Le Vésinet. Photographs of the painting by GalerieClub Fine Art.
