3-066-083 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sketches in Algeria, 1881. '1. Arabian Shepherd; 2. Shoemakers; 3. Mauresque; 4. Pedlar; 5. Minstrel Girl; 6. Orange Seller; 7. Camping; 8. Kabyles Playing Chess; 9. Arabian Cemetery...The great mass of the native people, Arabs and Kabyles, remain in primitive barbarism...The costumes and domestic or personal habits of different Mohammedan nations, the luxurious Moors, the pastoral or vagrant Arabs, and the Kabyle Highland peasantry, have often been described...It should be remembered that in these ancient seats of a rich and refined Mussulman community, which formerly took toll of all the commerce of Southern Europe that sailed past the North African shore, though now sunk into decay and degradation, all is not wild and savage; the pretensions of Moorish and Arabian gentility, however impoverished, are jealously maintained. The damsels represented in Sketch 3 and Sketch 5 might have stepped out of a palace in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments; the one is a young lady, the other a minstrel girl; but they seem to know the manners of courtesy and good society. The pedlar, the shoemakers, and the orange-seller are city street-folk of Algiers, contrasting with the rusticity of Kabyle peasants and shepherds and camel-drivers on the inland plain'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.