Prayer in the desert

Jules Guérin was an adept muralist, but was most celebrated as an illustrator. He originally studied art in Chicago before moving to Paris in the mid-1880s to study under Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant. The teacher awoke in the pupil a desire to explore North Africa and the Near East, trips which fuelled his illustrations for various travel books and magazines. The present work was printed as a bookplate in Egypt and its Monuments (1908), the first of three books which Guérin illustrated for the celebrated travel writer Robert Hichens. In an interview in 1913 for the New York Times Guérin described these travels with Hichens: ‘He is a most charming companion in every way, witty and delightful. We started to travel together, but we found out that a man who is painting and a man who is writing cannot very well stay together on a trip like this. The trouble is one does not always want to remain in the same place for the same length of time, for instance, in one historic place I stayed for about ten days and Hichens drove right through’. The present works depicts prayer, and was presented in the book discussing the sanctity of prayer in the city of Edfu. Guérin, himself a pious man, noted ‘Everything in religion in the Near East is a song – a thing of joy and of happiness’.