[Ayn at-Tawashi, Fountain Building at Hebron]

Diplomat, translator, epigrapher, numismatist and photographer Henri Sauvaire lived in the Middle East for almost four decades, from 1857 to 1883. After making photographs of family and friends in the late 1850s, he joined the Société de Photographie in Marseille in 1860 and continued to photograph for the next twenty years. He is best known today for accompanying the architect Christophe-Edouard Mauss on an excursion from Jerusalem through the Transjordan region in 1866, primarily to document the architectural remains of Karak and Shoubak. The trip, organized by the Duc de Luynes, was a continuation of the 1864 excursion around the Dead Sea photographed by Louis Vignes. Photographs from both trips were published in the 1875 publication Voyage d’Exploration à la Mer Morte, in which they were reproduced as photogravures by Charles Negre and lithographs by Eugène Cicéri. Like Vignes, Sauvaire experienced technical difficulties processsing his photographs because of extreme environmental conditions on site. The visual artifacts apparent in Sauvaire's view of Ayn at-Tawashi, however, seem intentional, with the effect that the desert edifice rises from the sand like a mirage.
The fountain itself was already dry when Sauvaire photographed it in 1866. The building was eventually made into a public lavatory and the decorative facade (built in the ablaq style of alternating light and dark stones and topped with a muqarnas cornice), has fallen into ruins.