Fromentin, Eugène

Eugène Fromentin, (born October 24, 1820, La Rochelle, France—died August 27, 1876, La Rochelle), French painter and author best known for his depictions of the land and people of Algeria.

Influenced successively by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Eugène Delacroix, Fromentin abandoned his early stiffness in design and execution and developed into a brilliant colourist. Fauconnier arabe (1863; “Arab Falconer”), La Chasse au héron (1865), and Souvenir d’Ezneh, Haute-Egypte (1876) clearly show his debt to Delacroix.

Fromentin’s paintings reveal only one side of a talent that was perhaps even more felicitously expressed in literature. 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 imaginative observation. Fromentin’s other literary works are Visites artistiques ou Simples Pélerinages (1852–56; “Artistic Visits or Simple Pilgrimages”); Un Été dans le Sahara (1857; “A Summer in the Sahara”); Une Année dans le Sahel (1858; “A Year in the Sahel”); and Les Maîtres d’autrefois (1876; The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland, or The Masters of Past Time).