Plough Ox and Mule with Fellah

Charles Verlat's 1876 painting of a plough ox and mule with a fellah — an Arabic-speaking peasant farmer — reflects the broader European Orientalist tradition of depicting the rural life of North Africa and the Middle East. Verlat made trips to North Africa and the Near East, and his animal paintings often combined Orientalist subject matter with his considerable gifts as a painter of animals. The combination of working animals and a local peasant figure was a conventional Orientalist scene presenting the East as timeless and pastoral. Verlat's training as both a figure and animal painter gave him particular command of this kind of subject.

Verlat renders the large working animals with the careful anatomical observation that distinguished his animal paintings, capturing the mass and musculature of ox and mule with convincing solidity. The figure of the fellah is painted more loosely in comparison.