On the Nile

Frederick and Julia Billings acquired three Egyptian scenes by Charles Théodore Frère, a French landscape and genre painter who studied under Cogniet and Roqueplan, and first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1834. He visited Algeria in 1837, and began painting the Near Eastern exotic scenes for which he became best known. In subsequent years he traveled widely around the Mediterranean, visiting Malta and Greece, spending a year and a half in Constantinople, touring Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. His paintings from those travels began to appear in the Salons of 1855 and later.