Louis Comfort Tiffany's beginnings as a painter have been overshadowed by his stunning achievements as a decorator and stained-glass designer. Yet this early work, which records the scene in terms of colored light filtering through veils of blowing sand, reveals a sensitivity to luminous colors that would also characterize his later pursuits in other media. Although Tiffany's orientalist paintings were studio productions, they grew mainly from his own observations of places he had visited (he went to Cairo in 1870) and, unlike many paintings of this genre by his contemporaries, offered no narrative pretense.