Alfred BASTIEN 'Horses and caravan in the Moroccan desert' Orientalist painting, oil on canvas, ca 1900

Signed Alfred Bastien lower right - Dedicated "to my friend Willy Bogaert", lower left.
On the back, two wax collection stamps, one in the name of the "Direction des bà¢timents de la maison du roi" and inscribed in black ink "à  S.A.R. Ch. de Flandres".
Alfred Théodore Joseph Bastien was born in Ixelles on September 16, 1873 and died in Uccle on June 7, 1955. He was an eclectic painter, producing portraits, still lifes, landscapes and genre scenes, some of which were Orientalist. His training followed the family's moves. He attended evening classes at the Ghent Academy, benefiting from the guidance of great teachers such as Théodore Canneel. He then left Ghent for Brussels, where he was "spotted" by the emblematic old Master of Orientalism in Belgium, Jean-François Portaels.
During the last decade of the 19th century, Bastien perfected his training in Paris, where he met Paul Verlaine and above all the great Masters he admired, exhibited at the Louvres (Delacroix, Géricault, Rembrandt, etc.). He developed a taste for travel and orientalism. In 1897, he was awarded the Prix Godecharle, and the associated financial gains enabled him to travel throughout Europe and around the world, as far as the Far East. The Great War shook Europe to its core, and Alfred Bastien, a close friend of the Royal Family, was asked to join 26 other artists to report on the situation at the front, particularly along the Yser. This experience gave him a real aptitude for producing panoramas (he produced 3 panorama-dioramas in the course of his career). After the war, the artist devoted himself to passing on his knowledge as professor of drawing at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels until 1945. He held this post alternately with the directorship of the Academy, which he held three times.