Fromentin, Eugène [-Samuel-Auguste]

Date born: 1820

Place born: La Rochelle, France

Date died: 1876

Place died: Saint-Maurice, France

Painter; founder of the modern practice of art criticism and art historian who helped reassert the primacy of the sixteenth-century masters of the low countries. His father, was an amateur artist who had trained under Jean-Victor Bertin Fromentin studied law in Paris beginning in1839, but switched to painting, studying under Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond (1795–1875) and then Nicolas-Louis Cabat. His first important piece of criticism appeared as the Salon of 1845. Fromentin visited Algeria in 1846 and debuted in the Salon in 1847 with two Algerian scenes, subjects occupying his interests throughout his career. He returned to Algeria twice more in 1847 and 1852, exhibiting in between as an Orientalist at the 1850–51 Salon. He married in 1852. Around the same time he began writing travel books, Un Eté dans le Sahara in 1857, and Une Année dans le Sahel in1859. He was recognized at the Salon of 1859 with a first-class medal and the Légion d’honneur. After 1860 his reputation as a painter was secure. Fromentin actually took on the French Academy in a lecture, Une programme de critque of 1864. Oriental Battle Incident, 1867; (National Gallery, Dublin), Land of Thirst, 1869, (Musée d’Orsay) and a series of centaur paintings in 1868 which were less enthusiastically appreciated, except by Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Degas. Fromentin returned to Algerian painting (and his success with the critics) in the 1874 Salon. Fromentin traveled to Low Countries in 1875 for a respite and became deeply enamored with the early Dutch and Flemish masters. He published Les Maîtres d’autrefois in 1876, a sensitive and sympathetic account of these artists at a time when their work was undervalued in France. He was uninterested in the early Netherlandish art or Vermeer, which had also failed to yet capture public interest. Fromentin used his knowledge as a painter in the Les Maîtres and the philosophy of Hippolyte Taine to illuminate the Dutch artists' their way of life. His account of the portraits of Rembrandt are among his finest writing. Fromentin exhibited once more at the Salon of 1876, contributing an anonymous criticism of the Salon to the Bibliothèque universelle et revue suisse in Lausanne. He contracted cutaneous anthrax and died at age 56 in the Val de Marne province of France.

Fromentin was most interested in art history as problems to be solved through a variety of methods, principally knowledge of artistic techniques and strong visual analysis; he avoided strong methodological positions (Kultermann termed him an "anti-methodical subjectivist" akin to Jakub Burckhardt, q.v.). His comparatively sober analysis of art caused Pittaluga to declare him the first modern art critic. His popularization of art critique is characteristic of Gründerzeit impulse and the rising power of an educated middle class. In the twentieth century, Fromentin was re-evaluated by Jan Bialosticki (q.v.) and Meyer Schapiro (q.v.).

Home Country: France

Sources: Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, pp.118-19; Thompson, James. "Fromentin, Eugène (-Samuel-Auguste)." Dictionary of Art; "Man of two muses." Apollo 110 (December 1979): 458-65; Bialostocki, Jan. "Rembrandt and posterity." Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 23 (1972): 131; Schapiro, Meyer. "Fromentin as a critic." Partisan Review 16 (January 1949): 25-51; Pittaluga, Mary. " Eugène Fromentin e le origine della moderne critica d'arte." L'Arte 20/21 (1917/18)

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