Concept

Nasreddine Dinet

Summary
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 North Africa and its culture, that he converted to Islam, and was proficient in Arabic. In addition to his paintings, he translated Arabic literature into French. 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. At that time he painted his first two Algerian pictures: les Terrasses de Laghouat and l’Oued M’Sila après l’orage. He won the silver medal for painting at the Exposition Universelle in 1889, and in the same year founded the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts along with Meissonier, Puvis de Chavannes, Rodin, Carolus-Duran and Charles Cottet. In 1887 he further founded with Léonce Bénédite, director of the Musée du Luxembourg, the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français. In 1903 he bought a house in Bou Saâda and spent three quarters of each year there. Dinet became so enchanted with North Africa and its culture, that he eventually converted to Islam. 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.
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