Twelve famous desert paintings, from Leonardo's unfinished Saint Jerome to Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Cross of 1929, show painters facing land where almost nothing grows. Many painted deserts they had never seen, built from a few lines of the Bible.
When the road to North Africa and the Middle East opened in the 1800s, some went to look, and paid with fever or an ambush. The question stayed: what to put in a place that holds almost nothing.
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How These Were Chosen
For a painter, a desert is land where water, shade and food run out. With no trees and no houses, the canvas comes down to ground, sky and one horizon line, and every object left in it, a jar, a pool, a skeleton, becomes a matter of survival.
The twelve paintings were chosen because the desert is their subject, the land a figure has to cross, survive or face, and not a backdrop. Deserts used as exotic decor for markets and oases were left out.
Many of these deserts begin with words, a verse of the Bible, a saint's letter, a travel book or the painter's own account. The story often lies in how far the picture follows them, and in the point where the painter leaves them behind.
12. Nicolas Poussin, The Gathering of the Manna (1638 to 1639)
In The Gathering of the Manna, painted by Nicolas Poussin in Rome in 1638 and 1639, white flakes lie on the ground of a rocky desert hemmed in by cliffs. A crowd of men, women and children reacts to the first food it has seen in days.
Some kneel to pick the flakes up, while others lie slumped, too weak to move. In the middle distance, Moses and Aaron stand as people bow before them. Poussin, a French painter who spent most of his career in Rome, made the canvas for his patron, Paul Fréart de Chantelou.
The episode is told in the Book of Exodus. After their escape from Egypt, the Israelites reach the wilderness of Sin, a stretch of desert between the oasis of Elim and Mount Sinai, and there their food runs out.
Poussin builds the crowd around that hunger. The figures on the left still show misery and want, while those on the right are already gathering.
Poussin had never seen a desert, and his wilderness of Sin has trees and cliffs. He followed the text closely all the same, except on one point. In Exodus, the manna simply lies on the ground in the morning, once the dew has lifted. On the canvas it also drifts down from the sky like snow.
That snow comes from Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian of the first century, whose account compares manna to snow. The Bible offered only a floor covered with food, and Josephus gave Poussin something that could be shown falling across the whole canvas.
The falling snow did not go unnoticed. On November 5, 1667, twenty-eight years after the picture was finished,
Charles Le Brun, first painter to King Louis XIV, lectured on it at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris, the royal academy that trained and ranked French painters.
During the discussion, a listener objected that the Israelites looked too languid and that the manna fell like snow. Le Brun replied that a painter has only a single moment to show, and must gather earlier incidents into it. That is how the starving on the left and the gatherers on the right can share one canvas.
At a Glance
Artist: Nicolas Poussin (1594 to 1665)
Painted: 1638 to 1639
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 149 × 200 cm (58.7 × 78.7 in)
Where to see it: Musée du Louvre, Paris
11. Gustave Guillaumet, The Sahara (1867)
The skeleton of a camel lies in the foreground of The Sahara, by the French painter Gustave Guillaumet, sharp and close, and flat desert runs behind it to the horizon. Far off, a thin line of camels and riders crosses under a glowing sky, so faint that it may be a real caravan or only a mirage.
Guillaumet sent The Sahara to the Paris Salon of 1868, the great official exhibition, where North Africa was most often shown through markets and cavalry scenes. He brought a canvas built around a dead animal, and the country it shows had already made him seriously ill.