Christian Adolf Schreyer, Algerian Horsemen near an Oasis (possibly Biskra), ca. 1863

Born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1828, Christian Adolf Schreyer traveled widely in search of exotic locales to paint. His canvases, inspired by the snowy plains of Eastern Europe and the deserts of North Africa, won medals at three Paris Salons, and wealthy American collectors sought them out.¹ After studying at Frankfurt’s Städel Institut, Schreyer served as a painter-reporter for the German regiment of Maximilian Karl (1802–71), 6th Prince of Thurn und Taxis, during the Crimean War (1854–57). A decade after his wartime experience, Schreyer enthralled Parisian audiences with immersive battle scenes hailed as “the work of a master.”² At the Salon of 1865, Schreyer earned a medal for The Charge of the Artillery of the Imperial Guard, Traktir, Crimea, 16 August 1855 (Fig. 1), purchased by the French State after the Salon and now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay. This painting displays all the trademarks of Schreyer’s work: proximity to the action, attention to the details of uniforms and anatomy, and empathy for the trauma experienced by warhorses. Schreyer’s depiction of horse anatomy is so precise that the Nelson-Atkins picture, which is contemporaneous to The Charge of the Artillery, was recently used as an illustration in a study on horse genetics.³

Schreyer made detailed studies during his many travels through the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa and used them to create finished paintings throughout his career. Since Schreyer recycled motifs and there is no existing archive of his correspondence, it is difficult to date his finished paintings.⁴ This dearth of Schreyer documentation means that scholarship on his oeuvre has mainly focused on French Orientalism more broadly or cited his name in a long list of artists painting similar images, like Eugène Fromentin (1820–76) and Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863).⁵ The titles of Schreyer’s paintings, including the former title of the Nelson-Atkins picture, Arab Horsemen, generally overlook the specificity of costume and context that he sought to depict. However, there are several visual clues here that provide evidence for where Schreyer traveled and what members of Algerian society he was able to depict, based on French colonial politics.

The specific group that Schreyer painted in many of his pictures, including the Nelson-Aktins painting, was the Arab Berber corps of mercenaries known as spahis, a critical component of French imperial rule.⁶ The most conclusive evidence thus far that the Nelson-Atkins picture depicts an advance party of spahis can be found in a review of the Salon of 1863 from the newspaper Le Temps. In it, the critic describes Schreyer’s painting Poste avancé arabe (Arab Outpost; no. 1707 in the Salon) specifically as “le poste avancé de spahis,” in which “a spahi mounted on a slate-gray horse” stands in the foreground in front of two other riders, one of which is “mounted on a chestnut horse.”⁷ The reviewer further notes three other riders sitting immobile on their steeds farther in the background, preparing to descend into a ravine. Based purely on this description of 1863, that painting must be the one sold at Christie’s in New York on October 22, 2008, under the title Arabischer Schimmelreiter (Arab on a White Horse; Fig. 2).⁸ That painting has much in common with the Nelson-Atkins picture, including an identical backdrop, probably the oasis of Biskra, and the rider in the red cap, who appears in both paintings.

As mentioned, Schreyer’s works are difficult to date, but he developed the motif of the Nelson-Atkins and Christie’s pictures around 1863, when he was living in Paris. Further historical context supports the assertion that the Nelson-Atkins painting, Algerian Horsemen near an Oasis (possibly Biskra), is a depiction of Algerian spahis policing a critical French military outpost. The term spahi, used to describe Indigenous Arab Berbers recruited by the French to assist in maintaining imperial control in the Maghreb (North Africa), derives from the Turkish sipahi. The French utilized a system of native mercenaries that had been effective for their Ottoman predecessors in North Africa. Unlike artists who traveled to Algeria later in the century, when it had become a popular tourist destination, Schreyer observed the military phase of the French conquest of Algeria. In Schreyer’s painting The Charge (Fig. 3), Indigenous men brandishing muskets gallop into the foreground. They emblematize the “anarchic tribal society” that the French perceived in North Africa; the French argued that they “saved” North Africa by imposing European order.⁹ The empty saddles and the figure who has slumped to the ground are evidence that these men are engaged in battle, though their enemies are beyond the picture’s frame. In comparison, the Nelson-Atkins picture depicts five horsemen arrayed against a mountainous backdrop, clad in red and white burnous (a long, loose, hooded garment traditionally worn by Arabs).¹⁰ In colonial Morocco, the Berber spahis were readily identifiable by their blue burnous. The French Resident-General in Morocco from 1912 to 1925, Marshal Hubert Lyautey, wrote of the spahis, “My thoughts go to the men in blue burnous, who gave their lives to French peace.”¹¹ Their Algerian counterparts, as seen in Schreyer’s paintings, wore red sashes and cloaks.

The red burnous was a recognizable motif in Orientalist art (Fig. 4) and literature and a hated symbol among Algerians fighting against French imperialism. In her 1922 short story Le manteau de spahi, the writer Colette depicts a French mother’s obsession with “the cloak of a spahi, red, and of fine cloth, [which] slept folded in a used sheet.”¹² The protagonist’s husband, a wounded French soldier, had brought the red burnous home as a trophy from the Algerian campaign. Despite the mother’s efforts at preservation, mites chew holes in the cloak, which devastates her. In Sage Goellner’s analysis of the story, the burnous stands for the amputated soldier, French nostalgia for days of empire gone by, and the tattered state of France’s colonial government in Algeria.¹³ At the end of the story, the father turns the ruined garment into a pen cleaner, transforming the exotic into the quotidian, which speaks to how colonialism infiltrated the everyday in mainland France.

The historical title of the Nelson-Atkins picture, The Oasis, is the first clue to determining where Schreyer traveled.¹⁴ One of his other pictures, Arab at a Fountain in Bouchagroune (Algérie) (location of painting unknown), includes the name of a town in Biskra Province, a region encircling the oasis of Biskra.¹⁵ The quickest route to Biskra at the time was a steamer ship from Marseille to the Algerian port of Skikda (renamed Philippeville in 1838 by the French colonial administration, in honor of King Louis-Philippe). From Skikda to Biskra was an additional two-hundred-mile overland journey, for a total of approximately three days’ travel from Paris.¹⁶ When Schreyer traveled there in 1861, Algeria was not yet fully under French control, and it is unclear if his journey would have been smooth. For the first forty years of French occupation, French Algeria was a military state.¹⁷ On March 14, 1844, Henri d’Orléans (1822–97), Duke of Aumale and King Louis-Philippe’s son, besieged Biskra with three thousand French troops and installed the Ben Ganah family as leaders of the city in return for their assistance to the French Army.¹⁸ While the French boasted that they had captured Biskra without firing a shot, there was a mutiny among the Indigenous mercenaries less than two months later.¹⁹ Resistance to French rule was persistent, and the garrison at Biskra required five hundred permanent French soldiers just to maintain their foothold in the North African desert.²⁰

A further clue that the backdrop in both the Nelson-Atkins and Christie’s pictures is a Biskra vista is the similarity of the white adobe structure atop the hill to Biskra’s local baths, the Hammam Salihine (Fig. 5), located in Vieux-Biskra at a higher elevation than the core of the city. Biskra has regular access to water due to its several intermittently watered riverbeds, one of which is visible from the Hammam Salihine and also appears in the left middle ground of the Christie’s picture. Water was such a crucial resource to the French that they ranked the 360 Saharan oases under their control by each one’s quantity of date palm trees, which indicated the strength of its water supply.²¹ Biskra’s prevalence of water and date palms earned it the moniker “Queen of the Sahara.”²² As early as the Middle Ages, Biskra was described as a “place of palm date trees and flowing water” by the Arab geographer Muhammed Al-Muqaddasī (945/6–991 ᴄᴇ).²³ Both European and Arabic sources speak to Biskra’s pivotal position at the mouth of the Sahara desert. Crowning the hillside behind the spahis, the baths were a critical piece of infrastructure for the French to control, which Schreyer highlighted by including them in the Nelson-Atkins and Christie’s pictures.

Once a darling of America’s most prominent collectors, Schreyer is scarcely mentioned in the vast body of modern scholarship on Orientalist painting. As the Nelson-Atkins picture shows, his depiction of Algerian spahis provides rare, early insight into the French colonial military state, whereas most other images of Biskra date from later in the century, when the city became a tourist destination. A recent exhibition at the Arab Institute in Paris highlighted Biskra’s burgeoning tourist industry beginning in the 1880s, assembling images of bazaars, fantasized harems, and photographs of other local sites as seen through European eyes.²⁴ Most famously, Henri Matisse’s Nu bleu (Souvenir de Biskra) / Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra) (1907; Baltimore Museum of Art) presented the Maghreb as a region that was easily accessible to Europeans in every sense. Schreyer’s paintings are a preamble to the development of Algeria as a tourist destination for Europeans. His depictions of spahis performing reconnaissance tasks at the mouth of the Sahara are crucial to a full understanding of the French imperial project in North Africa.

Notes

1. Chauncey Mitchell Depew Jr. (1879–1931), the son of a senator from New York, probably owned the Nelson-Atkins picture just before the museum purchased it in 1932.

2. Le Salon de 1865 (Lyon, France: L. Perrin, 1865), 17. Translations are by the author unless otherwise noted.

3. William M. Hudson Jr., Matrilines of the Egyptian Arabian Horse, 2 vols. (Cumming, GA: Hudson Cardiology, 2018).

4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a letter from Schreyer to the New York dealer Samuel P. Avery dated to 1879. The only painting referenced in it is one of Schreyer’s Eastern European scenes, Wallachwagen, Sonneneffect, April 1874, 37 13/16 x 22 in. (96 x 56 cm), which sold for six thousand francs. Christian Adolf Schreyer to Samuel P. Avery, June 20, 1879, “European Letters: Samuel Putnam Avery Papers,” Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll13/id/14805. Beyond this letter, there are no existing records of Schreyer’s words.

5. Schreyer has only received one retrospective in the United States, a 1972 exhibition at the Paine Art Center in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Edmund B. Nielsen curated the exhibition and compiled a much-needed but incomplete catalogue raisonné of Schreyer’s paintings: Adolf Schreyer: An International Exhibition Presented by the Paine Art Center and Arboretum, exh. cat. (Oshkosh, WI: Paine Art Center and Arboretum, 1972). Even within Schreyer’s home country, there has been only one monographic exhibition, Adolf Schreyer (1828–1899), held in 1999 in Kronberg im Taunus, where Schreyer died in 1899.

6. Berbers are one of the Indigenous groups of the Maghreb (North Africa). The more apt description of the men depicted in Schreyer’s picture is “Arab Berbers,” since there was significant intermarriage between Berbers and Arabs following the spread of Islam via the armies of the Prophet Muhammad to North Africa beginning in 652 ᴄᴇ. In modern-day Algeria, 99 percent of the population identifies as Arab Berbers, and the majority language is Arabic. “Algeria,” CIAWorldFactbook.gov (accessed November 5, 2019), https://web.archive.org/web/20070612211925/https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ag.html.

7. “Le poste avancé de spahis” (“The outpost of spahis”); “un spahis, monté sur un cheval gris ardoise” (“a spahi mounted on a slate-gray horse”); “monté sur un cheval al zan” (“mounted on a chestnut horse.”) “Salon de 1863,” Le Temps, no. 208 (July 12, 1863): 1.

8. 19th Century European Art and Orientalist Art (New York: Christie’s, October 22, 2008), lot 4, as Arabischer Schimmelreiter. The painting was in the J. P. Schneider collection in Frankfurt as of 1984 and later with Galerie Bühler in Munich. In this essay, I make the first identification of the 1863 picture as the one sold at Christie’s in 2008.

9. Driss Maghraoui, “From ‘Tribal Anarchy’ to ‘Military Order’: The Moroccan Troops in the Context of Colonial Morocco,” Oriente Moderno (2004): 230.

10. Derived from the Berber word abernus, the burnous is the traditional dress in the Maghreb. Made of heavy wool, a burnous is usually white. Wolfgang Bruhn and Maurice Cottaz, Encyclopédie du costume: Des peuples de l’Antiquité à nos jours ainsi que (Paris: Nouvelles editions latines, 1990), 80.

11. Maghraoui, “From ‘Tribal Anarchy’ to ‘Military Order,’” 228.

12. Colette, Le maison de Claudine (Paris: Ferenczi, 1922), 125.

13. Colette’s own father, Captain Jules-Joseph Colette, served in the Zouave regiment in North Africa. She noted that his military journals were eerily blank. She surmised that he was ambivalent about his military service and, in her short story, he is the model for the amputated father figure. Sage Goellner, “Algeria in France: Colette’s ‘Le manteaux de spahi,’” French Review 65, no. 3 (February 2012): 483, 486.

14. See Important Paintings by Schreyer, Heuner, Daubigny, Dessar, Murphy, Van Goyen, Gainsborough, Lobley, Van Huysam and Artists of Like Distinction from Several Collections together with an Atheneum Portrait of Washington, by Stuart, and a Portrait of Judge Robert Johnson, by Waldo from the Estate of the Late Chauncey M. Depew, Jr., O’Reilly’s Plaza Art Galleries, New York, December 4, 1931, lot 11, as The Oasis.

15. Schreyer gave this painting to the artist François Bonvin, who then lost his livelihood when he became blind and paralyzed. Bonvin sold his collection at Hôtel Drouot on May 9–10, 1887, to support himself. Catalogue de tableaux, aquarelles, dessins, sculptures, etc.; Offerts par les artistes a [sic] F. Bonvin, leur confrère frappe de cécité et de paralysie (Paris: Hôtel Drouot, May 9–10, 1887).

16. In Alfred E. Pease’s travel guide of 1893, he writes that European travelers in the Maghreb could take the train to reach Biskra from a variety of places, including Algiers and El Kantara. Alfred E. Pease, Biskra and the Oases and Desert of the Zibans with Information for Travellers (London: Edward Stanford, 1893), 9.

17. Patricia M. E. Lorcin, “Imperialism, Colonial Identity, and Race in Algeria, 1830–1870: The Role of the French Medical Corps,” Isis 90, no. 4 (December 1999): 655.

18. Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 29.

19. Brower, A Desert Named Peace, 40.

20. Brower, A Desert Named Peace, 41.

21. Pease, Biskra and the Oases and Desert of the Zibans, 35.

22. Major F. W. Begbie, “A Holiday Trip in Algeria,” Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps 7 (January 1906): 291.

23. Al-Muqaddasī cited and translated from Arabic to French in Mohamed Meouak, Les Ziban entre Aurès et Sahara: Une géographie historique de Biskra et des ses oasis du Moyen Âge à la fin de l’époque moderne (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2017), 154.

24. Roger Benjamin, Biskra: Sortilèges d’une oasis, exh. cat. (Paris: l’Institut du monde arabe, 2016).

Algerian Horsemen near an Oasis (possibly Biskra) was executed on a plain-weave canvas, corresponding closely in size to a standard-format no. 20 figure canvas.¹ Early in the its history, the painting was glue-paste lined, resulting in a slight expansion of the picture plane by a few millimeters on each side.² A branded stamp on the cross-member of the stretcher bears the name of an artist supplier, Deforge-Carpentier (Fig. 6). However, documentation on this company suggests that the address found on this stamp, “6 R. Halévy,” dates to their operations from August of 1870 to April of 1880, after the painting’ completion. In addition to supplying artists’ materials, this company also participated in the sales of art and provided restorations, including linings. The presence of this specific stamp indicates that this stretcher is possibly non-original and suggests that either a sale or restoration treatment may have occurred by Deforge-Carpentier within the first twenty years of this painting’s history.³

The canvas was prepared with a white or slightly off-white ground layer.⁴ No underdrawing was detected with infrared reflectography or through microscopy. Schreyer frequently repeated the same or similar compositional motifs between his paintings, possibly reducing his reliance on underdrawings as he became more familiar with his compositions.⁵ While minor artist changes are found throughout the composition, such as adjustments to the contours of the figures, three more notable changes were identified with infrared reflectography. As Schreyer finalized the image, he repositioned two of the gun barrels: the barrel for the leftmost figure was lowered approximately six millimeters to its current placement, and the angle of the barrel held by the rightmost figure was adjusted slightly, tipping it down. Infrared reflectography also reveals a dark shape between the two rightmost figures, resembling the head of a horse. This shape does not appear in the final composition and could possibly be the original placement of the horse on the right, or an additional horse that the artist chose not to include (Fig. 7).⁶

In place of a drawn preparation, it appears Schreyer laid in some components with an underpainting to establish the scene. A thin, warm-toned wash was applied beneath the landscape, ending shy of where the landscape meets the sky. This wash remains visible through much of the openly handled brushwork in the near foreground. Beneath some figures, such as in the head of the rider on the black horse, a red underlayer was painted, now visible through cracks in the paint (Fig. 8). Variations of warm and cool red underpaint are also found beneath the paint of the brown horses (Fig. 9), while the white horse does not appear to have been developed over a distinct underpainting.

Constructed with loose brushwork, the composition is primarily composed of wet-over-wet and wet-into-wet paint application. Schreyer worked rapidly, often feathering adjacent passages of paint both within the compositional elements and between them and their surroundings, creating a softened, atmospheric effect.⁷ In the leftmost figure, for example, paint was pulled across the profile slightly, subtly obscuring features and softening the face (Fig. 10). As opposed to using a common technique of layering glazes over opaque paint, Schreyer alternated between opaque and translucent paints, creating depth and modulation where there is otherwise little form. This can be seen in the draped clothing of the leftmost figure where a translucent red-brown paint not dissimilar to that used for the landscape underpainting is found between opaque scumbles (Fig. 11).

In comparison to his soft wet-into-wet blending, in other passages as the paint began to set, Schreyer continued to pull and manipulate the surface, often producing ripples and skips over the underlying paint, as is found in the face of the white horse (Fig. 12). Here, Schreyer’s knowledge of equine anatomy is evident, with the muzzle and nostrils developed through a few quickly placed brushstrokes.⁸ The artist also built the textures of the riders’ elaborate garments by allowing the top applications of paint to skip over the lower applications, likely once the lower paint was nearly dry to prevent blending. This is especially noticeable in the colorful fabric of the figure on the black horse, where vibrant reds skip over underlying blues (Fig. 13).⁹ In this image, two fingerprints made from beige or pale pink paint are visible in the top of the center red region. These marks do not appear to be intentional to the composition and thus further reveal Schreyer’s rapid technique as the artist either was unaware of their presence or chose not to remove them.

The painting is in good condition overall. Early in the painting’s history, it was glue-paste lined, during which time the tacking margins were likely removed. The lining remains in good condition with adequate adhesion. The canvas is well tensioned and in plane except for one dent, found approximately 14.5 centimeters from the bottom edge and 13.5 centimeters from the left edge. In 1988, the first documented treatment was completed, including varnish removal and retouching.¹⁰ During this treatment, it was noted that a “thick, badly discolored natural resin varnish” was removed, and it was replaced with a synthetic isolating varnish. Examination with ultraviolet radiation, however, indicates that an uneven surface coating, showing signs of abrasion and flaking, is currently present beneath the topmost layer (Figs. 14 and 15).¹¹ This layer produces a milky blue fluorescence, which could indicate the presence of wax used as a matting agent. Scattered areas that do not fluoresce do not appear to always correlate with areas of retouching but instead may also be areas where the older surface coating was successfully removed. Retouching is found along all four edges and in small, isolated areas throughout the picture plane.¹²

Notes

1. David Bomford, Jo Kirby, John Leighton, and Ashok Roy, Art in the Making: Impressionism (London: Yale University Press, 1991), 46.

2. A French standard-format no. 20 figure measures 73 x 60 centimeters. This painting’s current dimensions measure 73.5 x 61 centimeters; however, the approximate original measurements are 72.5 x 59.5 centimeters, based on creases indicating the original turnover edges.

3. While the stamp on the stretcher reads, “Deforge-Carpentier,” the company was established in 1830 as “Deforge” and changed its name and address several times throughout its history, including to “Deforge et Carpentier,” “Carpentier-Deforge,” and finally “Carpentier” before being sold and renamed “Bertrand et Cie” in 1880. This successor remained in operation at 6 R. Halévy until 1883. Pascal Labreuche, “Carpentier 1869–1880,” Guide Labreuche: Guide historique des fournisseurs de matériel pour Artistes à Paris, 1790–1960, 2018, https://www.guide-labreuche.com/en/collection/businesses/carpentier.

4. Due to the lack of tacking margins, it is unclear if the ground layer was applied commercially or by the artist.

5. See the accompanying catalogue entry by Glynnis Napier Stevenson for comparative works.

6. In the infrared reflectograph, the nearly vertical line in the sky to the left of the leftmost figure does not appear to relate to an artist change but instead is retouching over a crack in the paint.

7. Contemporaries of Schreyer commented on his ability to paint with accuracy while maintaining his rapid brushwork. James Thompson, The East, Imagined, Experienced, Remembered: Orientalist Nineteenth-Century Painting (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 1988), 140.

8. Schreyer’s appreciation for horses began early, and he learned how to ride at a young age. As an adult, he frequently sketched and painted horses as he traveled across Europe and Africa. Inge Eichler, “Kosmopolit und Pferdenarr: Der Frankfurter Maler Adolf Schreyer,” Weltkunst 69, no. 4 (1999): 702–04.

9. The only clearly identifiable wet-over-dry application is found in the left-side foliage, where green paint was applied over the already dried brown foreground.

10. Scott Heffley, October 18, 1988, treatment report, NAMA conservation file, 32-10.

11. Discrepancies in color temperature are the result of differing ultraviolet radiation sources between images.

12. Due to the complicated response of the painting with ultraviolet radiation (Fig. 14), areas of retouching were quantified through microscopy.