Alfred Couverchel (1834-1867)
Discover the other painters of our collection. A painter of the Orientalist school.
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.
Born 1834 · Beaux-Arts under Horace Vernet 1851 · First Salon 1857 · The Algerian Sahara 1861 · Collected by Napoleon III 1863 · Died 1867, aged 33
A Favored Pupil
Born in 1834 at Marseille-le-Petit, in the Oise, Alfred Couverchel entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1851. There he studied under François-Édouard Picot and, above all, under Horace Vernet, 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.
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, and in 1863, by authorization of the Governor of Algeria, he painted on the spot the capture of the rebel chief Mohamed Ben Abdallah, a canvas today held in the national museum of Algiers. He worked where the army marched, under a light Paris had never seen, and brought that light home in his baggage.
Glory, and a Life Cut Short
Couverchel's battle pieces and equestrian compositions found an enthusiastic public, and Napoleon III himself bought several for the imperial palaces. Success came fast: not yet thirty, he built a house with a vast studio at Le Vésinet, where he installed his family and gave lavish parties to celebrate his triumphs. He also contributed illustrations to the celebrated travel journal Le Tour du Monde. Then, on 1 September 1867, he died suddenly at Le Vésinet, only thirty-three years old. He left behind a brief but dazzling body of work, one of the most spirited chapters of French Orientalism.
The work in our collection. Our Couverchel is a wedding camel, harnessed for the marriage processions of the Algerian South: a single dromedary advancing head-on across the warm sand, draped in a cascade of colored wool fringes, red, blue, green and ochre, and crowned with a tall canopy carrying three plumes of ostrich feathers. Behind it, bare desert hills rise into a luminous blue sky.
Look closely: this is a painter who had traveled the Sahara. Couverchel does not draw each fringe; he sets them moving in quick, sure strokes, so that the whole harness seems to sway as the animal walks. The light is the true light of the desert, and the camel's gaze, gentle and weary, comes toward you as if out of the painting itself.
View this painting → · Oil on canvas, signed lower right Alf. Couverchel. 20½ × 11¾ inches.
Sources: Musée d'Orsay, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the municipal archives of Le Vésinet.
