Like other (though not all) artists interested in North Africa and the Middle East, Fromentin traveled widely in these regions in the 1840s and 1850s to study his subjects up close. This painting records one of his adventures as a working tourist, when he accompanied a group of nomads on a trek across Algeria. Though based on personal experience, the painting is shaped by romantic ideas and pictorial conventions, featuring sublime nature and picturesque exotic figure staffage.