Gustavo Simoni was a native of Rome who trained at the Accademia di San Luca and was a founding member of the Society of Watercolorists. From the late 1870s, he focused on North African subjects, inspired by Moorish architecture of Andalusia. He traveled to Algeria and Morocco, spending extended periods in Tlemcen as a base for his expeditions through the Maghreb deserts and cities. He won a gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1889 and counted King Umberto I among his patrons. Simoni was connected to the French art scene and Orientalism, opening a studio in Paris and founding a school of Orientalist painting in Rome in the 1890s.