1820 -1876 · Orientalist painting, Algeria, horse and literature

Horsemen, fantasias, fords, dust and silence of the desert make Eugène Fromentin a major painter of 19th century Algeria as much as an essential writer on art.

Eugène Fromentin was born in La Rochelle in 1820. After studying law, he chose painting and joined the workshop of the landscaper Louis-Nicolas Cabat in Paris. A first trip to Algeria in 1846 decided his direction. He returned there in 1848 then in 1852, traveling notably through Blida, Médéa, Laghouat and the Saharan regions. Fromentin observed horses, riders, camps, plains and atmospheric phenomena, but his paintings were recomposed in the Parisian workshop for the Salon. He refuses purely spectacular exoticism in favor of a poetry of distance: vast expanses, silver dust, overwhelming light and sudden movements of a fantasia or a hunt. The horse is central, studied in its anatomy as well as in its relationship to the rider. Fromentin is also a leading writer. A summer in the Sahara and A year in the Sahel combine travel, reflection and sensation; the novel Dominique explores memory and renunciation; The Masters of the Past, published in 1876, renews the criticism of Flemish and Dutch painters through a practitioner's analysis. He exhibited regularly, obtained official distinctions and pursued until his death a double career rarely equaled. Died in Saint-Maurice near La Rochelle in 1876, Fromentin left a work where painting and prose sought together the accuracy of the atmosphere. The selection "Eugène Fromentin" notably compares Arabs hunting falcons and Arabs crossing a ford. His reading favors drawing.

Fromentin paints less the anecdote than the distance: light, dust, the cadence of the horses and the silence of the terrain become the real subjects.