Nasreddine Dinet

Nasreddine Dinet (born as Alphonse-Étienne Dinet on 28 March 1861 – 24 December 1929, Paris) was a French orientalist painter and was one of the founders of the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Society for French Orientalist Painters. He became so enchanted with Algeria and its culture, that he converted to Islam, and was proficient in Arabic. In addition to his paintings, he translated Arabic literature into French. After converting to Islam, he chose the name Nasr ad-Din, which means "defender of the Dīn".

Biography Born in Paris, Alphonse-Étienne Dinet, was the son of a prominent French judge, Philippe Léon Dinet and Marie Odile Boucher. In 1865 his sister Jeanne, who would be his biographer, was born.

From 1871, he studied at the Lycée Henry IV, where the future president Alexandre Millerand was also among the students. Upon graduation in 1881 he enrolled in the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and entered the studio of Victor Galland. The following year he studied under William Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury at the Académie Julian. He also exhibited for the first time at the Salon des artistes français.

Dinet made his first trip to Bou Saâda by the Ouled Naïl Range in northern Algeria in 1884, with a team of entomologists. The following year he made a second trip on a government scholarship, this time to Laghouat.

In 1903 he bought a house in Bou Saâda and spent three quarters of each year there. He announced his conversion to Islam in a private letter of 1908, and completed his formal conversion in 1913 in Zawiyet El Hamel, upon which he changed his name to Nasr’Eddine Dinet. In 1929 he and his wife undertook the Hajj to Mecca. The respect he earned from the natives of Algeria was reflected by the 5,000 who attended his funeral on 12 January 1930 in Bou Saâda. . Compared to modernist painters such as Henri Matisse, who also visited northern Africa in the first decade of the 20th century, Dinet's paintings are extremely conservative. They are highly mimetic, indeed ethnographic, in their treatment of their subject.

Dinet's understanding of Arab culture and language set him apart from other orientalist artists because as an Arabic speaking visitor, he was able to find nude models in rural Algeria where the 'rule of the veil' was less frequently observed. Before 1900, most of his works could be characterized as "anecdotal genre scenes".

Legacy His life and work have been subject of several books, namely: Denise Brahimi and Koudir Benchikou, La Vie et l'oeuvre d' Etienne Dinet, [volume 2 in the series, Les Orientalistes], Paris, ACR edition, 1984 (Dinet’s Catalogue raisonné) J. M. Blades (ed.), The Art of Etienne Dinet, Shafik Gabr Collection, 2018