Eugène Fromentin

Eugène Fromentin

Eugène Fromentin (born October 24, 1820 in La Rochelle , † August 27, 1876 in St. Maurice near La Rochelle) was a French writer , art critic and painter . He gained his reputation as a writer with the psychological novel Dominique (1862).

Life

Egyptian women on the edge of the Nile , 1876

After school, at the request of his father, a doctor, he studied law in Paris from 1839 and then devoted himself to painting in addition to writing. One of his teachers was the landscape painter Louis Cabat . He oriented himself towards contemporary French painting and Dutch landscape paintings. He was influenced by Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot .

Fromentin was one of the earliest pictorial performers of Algeria . Influenced by the oriental painter Marilhat in particular, he decided to enter a new field of oriental painting by depicting the North African desert. In 1846 he traveled to Algeria for the first time for six weeks. Further trips to Algeria took place from 1848 to 1849 and from 1852 to 1853. The fruit of these study trips were not only numerous paintings, but also two excellent travel descriptions in letters: "Un été dans le Sahara" (1857; 8th edition 1884) and "Une année dans le Sahel" (1859; 5th edition 1884). An illustrated edition of both appeared in 1878. The novel Dominique first appeared in the Revue des Deux-Mondes (May 1862), then in Hachette (1863).

In addition to Algeria, his main places of activity were in North Africa , Paris , the Riviera (Saint-Raphaël) and La Rochelle. Fernand Cormon and Henri Gervex were among his students, and he was close friends with Gustave Moreau . Fromentin visited Egypt in 1869, Venice in 1870 and Belgium and Holland in 1875 , where he studied the Dutch masters and recorded the results of these studies in a written analysis: "Les maitres d'autre fois" (The Old Masters, Paris. 1876). The book was published in the last year of his life and contains a critical view of painting.

As a painter

As a painter, he particularly strove to reproduce the phenomena of light and air that appear in the desert climate with the greatest delicacy of the brushwork, but at the same time to give the accessories a characteristic meaning. His specialty was the gradation of tones in gray and purple. His main pictures are: Moorish burial (1853), gazelle hunt, audience with a caliph, black jugglers with the nomads, street Bab el Gharbi in El Aghuât (1859), Arab couriers, Arab bivouac at dawn, the Arab falcon hunter and the falconry in Algiers (1863, in Luxembourg), the heron hunt (1865), the Fantasia in Algiers (1869).

He was successful with his pictures of Algeria, as they corresponded to the artistic taste of the time. Today they are rather less noticed. His works can be viewed at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris , among other places .

Works (selection)

Arabs , 1871

photos

• Gazelle hunt, 1856, canvas, 98 × 195 cm, Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts
• Falcon hunt in Algeria , 1863
• Stop of an Arab troop of horsemen in a forest , 1868
• Falkenbeize , 1868, canvas, 45 × 85 cm, Paris, Musée National du Louvre
• Falcon stain in Algeria, canvas, 166 × 117 cm
• Land of Thirst , 1869
• Arab riders resting on the plain , 1870, canvas, 74 × 95 cm, Paris, Musée National du Louvre
• Arabs , 1871
• Egyptian women on the edge of the Nile (Un Souvenir d'Esneh) , 1876, canvas, 120 × 105 cm. Paris, Musée National du Louvre
• The Nile , wood, 33 × 41 cm. Paris, Musée National du Louvre.
• Dying of thirst in the desert , canvas, 103 × 143 cm; Overall dimensions: 168 × 300 cm. Paris, Musée National du Louvre.

Books

• Dominique - ISBN 3-7350-0084-3
• The Old Masters - ISBN 3-7701-4393-0

literature

• Eugène Fromentin, peintre et écrivain (1881) by Gonse (French)
• La Genèse de Dominique by C. Reynaud
• Literary Art of Eugene Fromentin: A Study in Style and Motif by Arthur R. Evans - ISBN 0-8018-0191-5 (English)
• La Vie Et L'Oeuvre D'Eugene Fromentin by James Thompson and Barbara Wright - ISBN 2-86770-021-3 (French)

Web links

Commons : Eugène Fromentin  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Eugène Fromentin in the catalog of the German National Library