Legend of the Desert was a major early painting exhibited by DuMond at the Paris Salon. It is very representative of the subject matter and aesthetics popular in late-nineteenth-century European painting. From midcentury on, artists of all nationalities produced thousands of paintings of the Mideast to satisfy the public’s curiosity about exotic lands, and many artists in search of brilliant sunlight actually traveled to North Africa.
DuMond emphasized the glaring desert light by surrounding the figures with large expanses of reflective ocher sand. Based on the biblical story of Hagar and Ishmael dying of thirst while lost in the desert (Genesis 21:8-20), DuMond took artistic liberties with the representation of Ishmael, making him older than the baby of the biblical story. The subject demonstrates the close association between orientalist themes and religious painting, which experienced a revival in the 1880s.
While DuMond modeled the figures fully, he approached the total composition two-dimensionally, eliminating the horizon and any sense of distance, thereby flattening the image. He attenuated the figures' anatomy, in particular Ishmael’s, by splaying his body out across the picture plane. The scene becomes a highly manipulated, two-dimensional design. Somewhat unusual was DuMond’s mixing of sand and pebbles into the paint surface along the lower foreground to heighten the feeling of gritty sand.
When DuMond signed the painting he added the place name Tipazah, probably referring to Teashur, a village in the Holy Land near Beersheba. According to the biblical account, Hagar and Ishmael wandered in the part of the desert known as the Wilderness of Beersheba. It seems quite extraordinary that DuMond, striving for authenticity, would paint such a huge canvas on site, rather than back in his studio. Perhaps the reference to Tipazah in the signature merely refers to the place where the artist first conceived of the painting.