Eugène Fromentin
Encyclopedia
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
painter and writer.
He was born in La Rochelle
La Rochelle
La Rochelle is a city in western France and a seaport on the Bay of Biscay, a part of the Atlantic Ocean. It is the capital of the Charente-Maritime department.The city is connected to the Île de Ré by a bridge completed on 19 May 1988...
. After leaving school he studied for some years under Louis Cabat
Louis-Nicolas Cabat
Louis-Nicolas Cabat was a French landscape painter.He was one of the most illustrious students of Camille Flers...
, the landscape painter. Fromentin was one of the earliest pictorial interpreters of Algeria
Algeria
Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...
, 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 Africa
North Africa
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...
n life. In 1849 he obtained 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. In a certain sense his works are contributions to ethnological science as much as they are works of art.
He has also written The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland, Dominique and A Summer in the Sahara. In The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland he deals with the complexity of Rubens and Rembrandt's paintings, style and the artists' emotions at the time of creating their masterpieces. He is also one of the first "art critics" to approcah the subject of The Old Masters from a personal point of view - being a painter himself. He also puts Rubens' work in a social, political and economic context, as the Dutch School of painting develops shortly after Holland won its independence in 1609. Meyer Schapiro has written a beautiful essay on Fromentin the writer, person and artist called.
His first great success was produced at the Salon
Paris Salon
The Salon , or rarely Paris Salon , beginning in 1725 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. Between 1748–1890 it was the greatest annual or biannual art event in the Western world...
of 1847, by the Gorges de la Chiffa. Among his more important works are:
- La Place de la Brèche à ConstantineConstantine, AlgeriaConstantine is the capital of Constantine Province in north-eastern Algeria. It was the capital of the same-named French département until 1962. Slightly inland, it is about 80 kilometres from the Mediterranean coast, on the banks of Rhumel river...
(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)
Fromentin, who maintained that "art is the expression of the invisible by means of the visible", was much influenced in style by Eugène Delacroix
Eugène Delacroix
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...
. 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
Revue des deux mondes
The Revue des deux Mondes is a French language monthly literary and cultural affairs magazine that has been published in Paris since 1829....
in 1862, and dedicated to George Sand
George Sand
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, later Baroness Dudevant , best known by her pseudonym George Sand , was a French novelist and memoirist.-Life:...
, is remarkable among the fiction of the century for delicate and imaginative observation and for emotional earnestness.
Fromentin's other literary works are Visites artistiques (1852); Simples Pèlerinages (1856); Un été dans le Sahara (1857); Une année dans le Sahel (1858); and Les Maîtres d'autrefois (1876), the last an influential appreciation of Early Netherlandish painting
Early Netherlandish painting
Early Netherlandish painting refers to the work of artists active in the Low Countries during the 15th- and early 16th-century Northern renaissance, especially in the flourishing Burgundian cities of Bruges and Ghent...
and the Northern Baroque to Rembrandt . In 1876 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Academy. He died suddenly at La Rochelle on August 27, 1876.
Sources
External links
- www.eugenefromentin.org Works by Eugène Fromentin