Victor Pierre Huguet

Biography of Victor Pierre Huguet ( 1835-1902 )

Victor Pierre Huguet was a genre and landscape painter, who studied in Marseille with Emile Loubon. At the age of seventeen, he left for Egypt and explored its beauty, its charm and discovered the lights of Orient. He then travelled alongside Durand-Brager in Crimea prior to the Sebastopol siege. The landscapes he crossed left their marks on him and later will definitely guide him to Orientalist painting.

In 1859 he exhibited at the Salon of Marseille The watering place and at the Paris’ Salon A Cairo view during the flood. On the same year, he met Eugène Fromentin who became his master. The young artist was deeply impressed by his professor and one can recognize the Fromentin’s sober palette in his first works. Yet Huguet quickly turned to warmer and brighter colours, with a subtle balance between ochre and blue tones.

He exhibited in 1861 Bichari Halt in the Lybyian desert at the Salon; the artwork attracted the audience's attention thanks to its extraordinary colours. From 1863, he became a regular at the Salon of Paris and exhibited Algerian landscapes, caravans, horsemen and horses. Huguet wrote to the famous art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and reminded him the great influence of doors in the city, very interesting motif which I hopefully will treat so to please you.

One can notice the remarkable luminosity standing out of his works and which earned him a great success. Huguet, recognized as an orientalist painter, travelled south round the Mediterranean Sea, in Algeria, Tunisia and Turkey from where he brought back paintings full of light and exoticism. 

He took part of the Salon of French Orientalist painters from its very beginning in 1893. He was exhibited several times with paintings strongly influenced and inspired by Algeria, like A door in Biskra, The candle fountain, Horses bathing and Caravan crossing a ford. Huguet is one of the greatest French orientalist painters.