Eugène Fromentin

Eugène Fromentin
Eugène Fromentin
Born	24 October 1820; La Rochelle
Died	27 August 1876 (aged 55); La Rochelle
Nationality	French
Education	Louis Cabat
Known for	Painter, Author
Movement	Orientalist

Eugène Fromentin (French pronunciation: [øʒɛn fʁɔmɑ̃tɛ̃]; 24 October 1820 – 27 August 1876) was a French painter and writer,^[1] now better remembered for his writings.

Life

He was born in La Rochelle. After leaving school he studied for some years under Louis Cabat, the landscape painter. Fromentin was one of the earliest pictorial interpreters of Algeria, having been able, while quite young, to visit the land and people that suggested the subjects of most of his works, and to store his memory as well as his portfolio with the picturesque and characteristic details of North African life. His first great success was produced at the Salon of 1847, by the Gorges de la Chiffa. In 1849, he was awarded a medal of the second class.^[2]

In 1852, he paid a second visit to Algeria, accompanying an archaeological mission, and then completed that minute study of the scenery of the country and of the habits of its people which enabled him to give to his after-work the realistic accuracy that comes from intimate knowledge.^[2]

His books include Les Maîtres d'autrefois ("The Masters of Past Time", 1876), an influential appreciation of Early Netherlandish painting and the Northern Baroque of the Old Masters of Belgium and Holland, Dominique and A Summer in the Sahara. In Les Maîtres d'autrefois he deals with the complexity of paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt and others, their style and the artists' emotions at the time of creating their masterpieces. He is also one of the first "art critics" to approach the subject of The Old Masters from a personal point of view – being a painter himself. He also puts the work in a social, political and economic context, as the Dutch Golden Age painting develops shortly after Holland won its independence. Bernhard Berenson wrote of the book, "I carry Fromentin with me, and read him each evening about the pictures I have seen that he criticizes. He is the only writer on pictures worth his salt, but I do not always agree with him."^[3]

Works

Among his more important works are:

La Place de la Brèche^[4] à Constantine (1849)
Enterrement Maure (1853)
Bateleurs nègres (1859)
Audience chez un chalife (1859)
Berger kabyle (1859)
Courriers arabes (1861)
Bivouac arabe (1863)
Chasse au faucon (1863)
Fauconnier arabe (now at Luxembourg) (1863)
Chasse au héron (1865)
Voleurs de nuit (1867)
Centaures et arabes attaqués par une lionne (1868)
Halte de muletiers (1869)
Le Nil (1875)
Un souvenir d'Esneh (1875)

Selection of works
Hunting heron, Algeria, 1865
Arabs, 1871
Moroccan Horsemen at the Foot of the Chiffra Cliffs
Un Souvenir d'Esneh, 1876
Windstorm on the Esparto Plains of the Sahara, 1864

Fromentin, who maintained that "art is the expression of the invisible by means of the visible," was much influenced in style by Eugène Delacroix. His works are distinguished by striking composition, great dexterity of handling and brilliancy of colour. In them is given with great truth and refinement the unconscious grandeur of barbarian and animal attitudes and gestures. His later works, however, show signs of an exhausted vein and of an exhausted spirit, accompanied or caused by physical enfeeblement.^[2]

But it must be observed that Fromentin's paintings show only one side of a genius that was perhaps even more felicitously expressed in literature, though with less profusion. Dominique, first published in the Revue des deux mondes in 1862, and dedicated to George Sand, is remarkable among the fiction of the century for delicate and imaginative observation and for emotional earnestness.^[2]

Fromentin's other literary works include Visites artistiques (1852); Simples Pèlerinages (1856); Un été dans le Sahara (1857); Une année dans le Sahel (1858). In 1876 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Academy. He died suddenly at La Rochelle on 27 August 1876.^[2]

References

^ Speake, Jennifer, ed. (2003). Literature of Travels and Explorations. Vol. 1 A to F. New York: Taylor & Francis Books. pp. 471–472.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Chisholm 1911.
^ Letter dated March 18, 1888, in The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1887-1924, edited by Rollin van N. Hadley, Boston: Northwestern University Press, 1987, p. 19.
^ "La poste – Constantine (Algérie)". www.engival.fr.

Attribution:

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Fromentin, Eugène". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 11 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 246–247.

Bibliography: Works by Eugène Fromentin in English translation

"A Critic's Program" and "A Letter to a Young Artist" in Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848-1900: Sources and Documents, edited by Linda Nochlin, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966, pp. 19-25; reprinted from the Mary Caroline Robbins translation of Gonse (1888).
Between Sea and Sahara: An Algerian Journal, translation by Blake Robinson of Une Anée dans le Sahel (1859), Ohio University Press, 1999; reissued in 2004 by Tauris Parke Paperbacks with the subtitle An Orientalist Adventure.
Dominique, translation by V.I. Longman of the novel Dominique (1862), London: Gerald Howe, Ltd., 1932.
"The Isle of Ré: An Unpublished Fragment" in Eugène Fromentin, Painter and Writer by Louis Gonse, translated by Mary Caroline Robbins, Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1888, pp. 251-271; various other quotations, letters, and excerpts by Fromentin, translated by Robbins, appear throughout the book.
The Masters of Past Time, or Criticism on the Old Flemish & Dutch Painters, uncredited translation of Les Maîtres d'autrefois (1876), New York: E.P. Dutton, 1913.
The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland, translation by Mrs. Mary C. Robbins of Les Maîtres d'autrefois (1876), Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1882.

Bibliography: Writings about Fromentin in English

Bales, Richard. Persuasion in the French Personal Novel: Studies of Chateaubriand, Constant, Balzac, Nerval, and Fromentin, Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1997.
Beaume, Georges. Fromentin, translated from the French by Frederic Taber Cooper, New York: Stokes, 1913.
Christin, Anne-Marie, and Berrong, Richard M. "Space and Convention in Eugène Fromentin: The Algerian Experience", New Literary History, vol. 15, no. 3, Spring, 1984, pp. 559-574.
Evans, Arthur R., Jr.. The Literary Art of Eugène Fromentin: A Study in Style and Motif, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966.
"Eugene Fromentin", The Art Amateur, vol. 12, no. 1, Dec., 1884, p. 9.
"Fromentin, Eugène", Benezit Dictionary of Artists, published online 31 October 2011.
Gill, Hélène. "Eugene Fromentin and the Experience of the Desert: Self-quest in the Other's Territory," Chapter 3 in The Language of French Orientalist Painting, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.
Gillet, Louis. "Eugène Fromentin" in The Catholic Encyclopedia, New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909.
Gonse, Louis. Eugène Fromentin, Painter and Writer, translated by Mary Caroline Robbins, Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1888.
Harris, Frank. "Eugéne Fromentin: The Painter-Writer", Chapter XIV in Latest Contemporary Portraits, New York: The Macaulay Company, 1927.
Hartman, Elwood. Three Nineteenth-Century French Writer/Artists and the Maghreb: The Literary and Artistic Depictions of North Africa by Théophile Gautier, Eugène Fromentin, and Pierre Loti, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1994.
Kaplan, Judith. "Eugéne Fromentin (1820-1876)" in Orientalist Writers, edited by Coeli Fitzpatrick and Dwayne A. Tunstall, Detroit : Gale Cengage Learning, 2012.
Magill, Frank N., editor. "Dominique by Eugéne Fromentin" in Masterplots: 2010 Plot Stories & Essay Reviews from the World's Fine Literature, Revised Edition, volume 3, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1976.
Mickel, Emanuel J. Eugène Fromentin, Twayne's World Authors Series 640, Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1981.
Schapiro, Meyer. "Eugene Fromentin as Critic" in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society, Selected Papers, New York: George Braziller, 1994.
Thompson, James P. W. "Fromentin, Eugène(-Samuel-Auguste)", Grove Art Online, published online 2003.
Wright, Barbara. "Eugène Fromentin's 'Portrait de Jeune Femme' and the Possible Identification of Its Sources", The Burlington Magazine, vol. 116, no. 854, May, 1974, pp. 274-275.
Wright, Barbara. "A drawing for 'Hodna': an early painting by Eugène Fromentin," The Burlington Magazine, vol. 155, no. 1322, May, 2013, pp. 324-325.
Wright, Barbara. Eugène Fromentin: A Life in Art and Letters, Peter Lang, 2000.
Wright, Barbara. "Eugène Fromentin (1820-76)" in Key Writers on Art, volume I, edited by Chris Murray, New York: Routledge, 2003.