Edouard Brindeau De Jarny - The Rest Of The Rakkas In Tahanaout, Morocco

Édouard Brindeau de Jarny was a painter of portraits and landscapes, but is best known as an Orientalist painter. In 1885, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and studied under Henri Gervex, Ferdinand Humbert, and Jean-Baptiste Lavastre. He exhibited for the first time at the Salon desArtistes Français in 1888 with a portrait of a woman. At the end of the 19th century, he began painting landscapes of Algeria. But it wasin 1919 that he decided to settle in Casablanca, Morocco, where he founded a school of fine arts and helped establish Morocco’s first Museum of Fine Arts, of which he became director. He also helped establish the Salon des Peintres del’Afrique du Nord. He then painted Morocco and its people while traveling through the interior of the country as far as the Middle Atlas.

Our painting is a fine example of his work in Morocco. It depicts a rekkas in a landscape of Tahanaout near Marrakesh, at the foot of the High Atlas, at the entrance to the Ourika Valley. It is datedOctober 1936.

The rekkas was the predecessor of the mail carrier in Morocco, a messenger on foottasked with transporting mail, dispatches, and official orders across the various regions of the Cherifian Empire,between Tangier and Fez or between Marrakech and the interior of the country, for example. Renowned for his extraordinary endurance, he covered very long distances by running. In short, he was something of a precursorto today’s ultra-trail runners!