Passing through El Kantara, the line went down to the oasis of Biskra—all country celebrated in

Orientalist painting. El Kantara, “a sudden breach in the mountains, as if cleft by a formidable sword

stroke,”10 had been the subject of innumerable photographs and Orientalist canvases; its literary con-

secration had begun with Fromentin. The oases of the Zibane some fifty kilometers south, Tolga and

Biskra above all, had also been painted repeatedly since the 1880s by artists like Guillaumet, Lan-

delle, Dinet, and Leroy. As Prosper Ricard, a specialist in North African architecture and art, ex-

plained, “Because of its mild climate, its proximity to the great steppes, and its important oasis, Biskra

is a winter station that is much frequented. Next to the oasis a hybrid town has been created, whose

activity is fortunately more interesting than its architecture.” 11 Biskra, once a Roman settlement, had

been occupied by the French since 1849, its “hybrid town” laid out on a grid abutting the Fort St.

Germain (Fig. 71). Here was the Biskra that for Isabelle Eberhardt had been “sullied and deposed,”

complete with town hall, church, military club, and numerous buildings dedicated to tourism, from

the Palace Hotel to the Biskra Casino. The casino, in Moorish style, boasted “gaming rooms, café-

concerts, and indigenous dances.” 12 The resort’s public gardens and racecourse competed with the

attractions of ethno-tourism: the quarter of the Ouled-Naïls (next to the market), the “Moorish bath”

and the “Negro village,” and camelback excursions to the desert organized by the Comité d’hiver-

nage de Biskra. If Eberhardt refrained from engaging this environment in her short stories, it was

nevertheless the setting of Robert Hichens’s popular 1904 novel The Garden of Allah (in which Biskra

is detailed prior to an account of adventures in the desert farther south) and, as we will see, of An-

dré Gide’s Immoraliste.13

The several scattered indigenous settlements of nearby Old Biskra, “strange villages of earth, al-

ways crumbling, ceaselessly rebuilt,” attracted painters, as did the “oasis of 150,000 palm trees, slen-

der and superb, o¤ering their blooming aigrettes to the sun, [and] the innumerable seghias that flow,

brimful, along earthen levees.” 14 Such scenes were the subject of paintings like Guillaumet’s Orsay

Seghia, Biskra (see Fig. 20) and of most picturesque photographs of the oasis. At the annual exhi-

bitions of the Orientalist Painters in Paris between 1893 and 1911, thirty-five painters exhibited many

dozens of pictures—landscapes, interiors, figure paintings—from Biskra. In 1893 (the year André

Gide first visited, in the company of Renoir’s friend Landelle) no fewer than seven painters showed

Biskra paintings at the Orientalist Painters. The oasis was a veritable Barbizon—or, better still, a

Pont-Aven—of the exotic landscape.

Many features of the Biskran picturesque are evident in the one painting that survives from Ma-

tisse ’s Algerian trip, the little oil sketch on panel Street in Biskra (Rue à Biskra, Fig. 72). In a classic

view up a street, Matisse marshals a shaded wall as the right-hand coulisse. In the shadow an Arab

man sits, sheltering from the sun in a posture immortalized by Fromentin’s Street in Laghouat. To the

right and left are the inevitable date palms, etched against the sky with gestural strokes. Houses are

visible, the pitched roof of a European-style dwelling at left, and in the center distance the open arches

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