Gaspard de Toursky

Gaspard de Toursky (Russian: Гаспар де Турски, Arabic: غاسبار دي تورسكي) was a Russian orientalist painter and lithographer born in 1849 in Saint Petersburg and died on June 15, 1925 in Souk Ahras in Algeria, where he was buried under the name of Abdelrahman Labiad after his conversion to Islam.

From a young age, Gaspard de Toursky trained with an icon painter. At the age of 15 he took painting lessons, then in 1895 he studied at the Saint Petersburg Academy then in Moscow with Valentin Serov. In 1866, he went to Munich to follow a more advanced academic education. His studies allowed him to travel, mainly in France, Italy, Holland, England, North Africa, especially Algeria. These trips were decisive for the artist's career. Indeed, it was his trip to Italy that made him decide to pursue his career as a painter, hesitating between a career as a painter or a writer.

Painting in oil on his canvases, Gaspard de Toursky has a very academic style distinguished by his great mastery of color palettes of warm tones as in the canvas Women in the Camp. The wild landscapes of Algeria in Halte Au Bord d'El Kantara (1904) and scenes of nomadic life such as La Caravane, are the painter's favorite subjects.

In addition to the representation of the usual nomadic lifestyles in Algeria at his time, Gaspard de Toursky paints genre scenes such as La Toilette au Harem dating from the beginning of the 20th century. This oil on canvas reflects the daily life of a harem featuring various women enjoying a sunbath in a bright inner courtyard. In this work, the painter particularly masters the play of light as well as the typical details of orientalism such as architecture or orange trees. On a large scale, this canvas is a good example of the work of the artist whose majority of works were painted in Algeria.

During a trip to Algeria, he arrived in Souk Ahras in 1881 in the company of the French writer Alphonse Daudet who had called on him to illustrate his book Tartarin de Tarascon. Fascinated by the beauty of the nature of Souk Ahras and the richness of its fauna, Gaspard decided to stay in this city that fascinated him and never left again. A great lover of hunting at the start, he became one of the fiercest defenders of nature, trying to save the last Atlas Lions of Souk Ahras, by building a small zoo near Aïn Tahmimine.

Very close to the Muslim population of Souk Ahras, Gaspard converted to Islam in 1918. One of his biographers claims that Gaspard's conversion was more political than religious. Gaspard wanted to feel Muslim among Muslims, he who had always condemned the actions of colonial France in Algeria. In 1905, he painted the famous painting The Insurgents of Souk Ahras. France at the time had forced him to rename the painting Fantasia in order to participate in the Paris International Fair, where he received the gold medal.

Gaspard painted more than 350 paintings, several of which were devoted to the nature and wildlife of Souk Ahras. He exhibited in Paris all his works from his travels in North Africa in 1908 in Paris, in Morocco in 1917, in Algeria in 1923.

Gaspard de Toursky died on June 15, 1925 in Souk Ahras, at the age of 76, and was buried there under the name of Abdelrahman Labiad after his conversion to Islam in 1918.