Eugène Fromentin

Eugène Fromentin
Born	(1820-10-24)24 October 1820 La Rochelle
Died	27 August 1876(1876-08-27) (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, 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.

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.

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. The book developed from articles for journals.

Works

Among his more important works are:

• La Place de la Brèche 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.

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.

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.

See also

• List of Orientalist artists
• Orientalism

References

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

• Between Sea and Sahara: An Algerian Journal, translation by Blake Roginson 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 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

• 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.
• 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.

External links

Media related to Eugène Fromentin at Wikimedia Commons

• Encyclopædia Britannica
• Works by Eugène Fromentin at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Eugène Fromentin at the Internet Archive
• www.eugenefromentin.org Works by Eugène Fromentin