Part 2

Algeria had won him once and forever. It was decreed by fate that he should understand that African land which offered certain points of resemblance with the land of Aunis and of Saintonge. The same flat, level stretch, abandoned to the rages of the sun, or lashed by the fury of the tempests, or shivering beneath the shadow of clouds; the same voice of silence and of solitude to which he had so often listened with beating heart in the habitually melancholy fields surrounding La Rochelle, he heard again in these desolate reaches of the desert, across the burning sands, whose infinite extent is rendered almost sad by the excessive ardour of the light of heaven. Africa became the second land which he wished to cherish with all his heart and which belonged to him: he made it his own by the right of his genius, through the works of his brush and the works of his pen. From a new journey which he undertook in 1852, a wedding journey, radiant with every promise of happiness--since he had just wedded the sister of his friend, Dumesnil, who understood him and whom he loved--he brought back two volumes, _A Summer in the Sahara_ and _An Army in Sahel_. The first of these appeared in the _Revue de Paris_ and the second in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. In the world of letters these two works produced a great sensation. With what finished and majestic simplicity Fromentin painted his white page with colours which his poet’s eyes had unerringly retained! “The weather is magnificent. The heat is augmenting rapidly, but so far its effect upon me has been stimulating rather than exhausting. For the past eight days not a cloud has appeared on any part of the horizon. The sky is an ardent and sterile blue that gives promise of a long period of drought. The wind, fixed in the east and almost as hot as the air at rest, blows intermittently, morning and evening, but always very lightly, and as if only for the purpose of keeping up a gentle swaying of the palm trees, similar to that of the Hindoo _panwa_ dance. For a long time past, everyone has worn the thinnest of clothing and broad-brimmed hats, and no one ventures out of the shade. I cannot, however, bring myself to adopt the siesta.”

Thus, through two masterpieces, a new writer, of strong and pure French stock, suddenly revealed himself. The most distinguished novelists and critics of the day, George Sand, Théophile Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, sent him their heartiest congratulations and sought his friendship. In both of these books, Fromentin showed himself to be not only a curious and close observer, but a subtle and trained psychologist. He studied not only the outward forms of people and of things, he probed the depths as well, the underlying spirit; and having found it, he revealed it to others with keen and original discernment. What he saw in those tribes and peoples, as new to him as they are to us, was not merely the picturesqueness of their attitudes and the exuberant brilliance of their land, but the whole predestined history of the race from its origins, as revealed in the practice of their strange customs and the passionate intensity of their instincts. For Fromentin was not one of those who find satisfaction solely in the contemplation of beauty. He was above all one of the kind that wants to understand the meaning and the cause of beauty, in order to enjoy more keenly its possession.

It is interesting to compare with Fromentin the painter, who paints best of all with his pen, a poet of the highest rank, who came later than he in this same region of Saintonge: Pierre Loti. Roving, restless, concerned solely with the misery of his own soul and the beauty of the world, Loti carries his dreams with him to the remotest shores, and in order to distract his thoughts from life which bores him, he has gathered together extraordinary colours, the brilliant dust of picturesque ruins, and has created for himself a capricious and sensual world, in which nothing, perhaps, is real excepting his own melancholy, yet which amuses and enchants him with its prodigious fund of poetry. Like Loti, Fromentin also had an eye for rich and dazzling hues and knew how to render them with his pen. But being less feverish, more self-controlled in heart and mind, he did not write merely for the sake of depicting faces and backgrounds; he developed his robust and harmonious phrases for the purpose of interpreting, and preferably in their most vivid aspects, the dominant impulse of a race, the art with which a picture is composed, the design of a landscape, the emotion of an hour, or the spirit of an epoch.

“To Fromentin,” writes Gabriel Trarieux, “the function of an adjective is to appeal, not to the eye or ear, but to the moral sense. Nature, to this psychologist, is not an inert colour, but an inner voice. He shows us Africa, and more especially his own heart. Is such conscientiousness, such self-revelation, a distinctive mark of the native of Charente? For my part, I think it is.”

His offerings to the Salon continued uninterruptedly, year after year. Only the more famous need be mentioned: _The Moorish Burial_ (1850); _The Negro Boatmen_ (1859); _Horsemen returning from a Fantasia_, _Couriers from the Land of the Ouled Naïls_ (1861); _The Arab Bivouac at Daybreak_, _The Arab Falconer_, _Hunting with the Falcon in Algeria, The Quarry_ (1863); _Windstorm in the Plains of Algiers_ (1864); _Heron Hunting_, _Thieves of the Night_ (1865); _A Tribe on the March through the Pasture_ _Lands of Tell, A Pool in an Oasis_ (1866); _Arabs attacked by a Lioness_ (1868); _Halt of the Muleteers_ (1869); and his last five pictures, _The Grand Canal_ and _The Breakwater_ (1872); _The Ravine_ (1874); _The Nile_ and _View of Esneh_ (1876).

With the second picture that he exhibited, _The Place of the Breach in Constantine_, the talent of the painter was officially recognized by the bestowal of a Second Class Medal. Fromentin, nevertheless, knew his weaknesses. What distressed him the most was that he still saw what was _pretty_, rather than what was _great_; a defect of instinct which is particularly conspicuous in _The Moorish Burial_ (1850) and _The Gazelle Hunt_ (1859). He strove, by consulting nature ceaselessly, to rid himself of this _almost-but-not quite_ tendency, of which he could never have been cured by mere studio work. He soon began, as a matter of fact, to acquire a truer and broader vision. He grasped this singular fact, peculiar to tropical lands: namely, that, howsoever discordant the details of a landscape may be, they form a sum total that is always simple and easy to transcribe upon a canvas. Since he never played false, either with himself or with nature, he mirrored back accurately, through the crystal clearness of his mind, the form and colour of the objects before him. Looking to-day at such pictures as _An Audience before the Caliph_, _The Negro Boatmen_, and a host of others, we breathe in, just as we do in reading his books, that indefinable odour of the Orient which comes from the smoke of the camp fires and the tobacco, from the orange trees and from the persons of the natives themselves; we delight our eyes with the venerable olive trees of the sacred grove at Blidah, with the plain bounded on the north by the long chain of the hills of Sahel, low-lying, gray in the morning, ruddy at noon, with just one white spot toward the northeast, at Coléah, where there is a vast gap, formed by the course of the Mazapan River, through which we get a glimpse of the sea.

The entire series of sketches and notes which, from Constantine to Biskra, by way of Lambessa, Fromentin collected during his journey into the heart of Algeria, he was destined to make use of later on, to guard himself from ever falsifying. And if the colours of his paintings are often timid, it is precisely for the reason that in the seclusion of his studio, remote from Africa, he lacked that pulsation of generous light, with which he needed to be enveloped, in order to kindle his palette to the required glow.

III.--AN EVOLUTION

Eugène Fromentin will be remembered as the painter of Algeria, or at least as one of the first who revealed it in such a way as to make it beloved. Not the Algeria of the South, lost amid a furnace of sunshine and of sand, but the Algeria which is accessible to all, that of the Arabs, with peaceful cities set in the midst of ruins, and grateful palm groves forgotten, like baskets after a festival, on the border of the desert; the Algeria of ceremonious and brilliant fantasias, of mosques, of battle-fields still smoking, and of vagabond tribes. It may be regretted that he contented himself with seeing the Arab exclusively outside his tent, in the open light of sand and sky, and that, instead of confining his studies to external phases of life, he never ventured to penetrate to his hearthstone, in the intimacy of his family life. Yet who would reproach the artist for his scrupulous delicacy and discretion?

Jules Claretie was quite right in declaring that Marilhat brought back from the Orient landscapes imbued with profound melancholy, Decamps scenes distinguished for their dazzling brilliance, Delacroix spectacles of majestic grandeur, and that Fromentin in his turn discovered in that land of light a personal note which his predecessors would have sought in vain, since he carried it within himself. The colour scale of Fromentin is a subdued one; his favourite shades are the half-tones.

In the presence of that brilliant land, ennobled by centuries of history, Fromentin remained, nevertheless, a Parisian of the purest stock. His Arabs are all keenly alert, down to the very folds of their burnooses. He could not bear to behold ugliness; he transformed it through the golden warp of his imagination. Although his pictures lack the harsh vibration of the desert and a sense of its far-reaching monotony, the desert nevertheless loses nothing of its grandeur; because his poet’s understanding, more infinite than the expanses of the dunes, passed of its own accord beyond the bounds of a horizon which, unlike that of the sea, is not void save for the passerby who is incapable of emotion and comprehension. Beneath his sober brush, the Arabs retain all their strange attractions, which he amply indicates by a single dash of light, just as in his books he evokes a landscape or an individual by a single word. His eyes took in the outward form of things as completely as his mind penetrated the minds of others. His unwearied power of observation neglected nothing that pertained to light; consequently the accuracy of his paintings, comparable to that of historic documents, is attested by every traveller.

_The Fantasia_, for example, gives an admirable presentment of the open country around Algiers and of one aspect of Arab manners and customs. It shows us a numerous cavalcade galloping at headlong speed, with clamorous shouts and discharge of guns, across a broad plain toward a knoll on which the mounted emir sits in judgment. This mingling of motley garments and of horses galloping in all directions produces a scene of extraordinary animation and a liveliness of tone that contrasts sharply with the bare immensity of the plain and the uniformity of the sky.

Suddenly, in 1861, Fromentin’s manner was marked by a complete evolution. Not that he abandoned the fine and delicate methods habitual with him, the methods of a poet seeking to interpret his visions and his sentiments through his skill in animated composition. Nothing of his originality was sacrificed. His power, on the contrary, was increased, because he had learned, in regard to the inspiration of his works, how to see reality more truly, and in regard to the resources of his art, how to understand better the superior methods of his compeers and his masters. But he had seen Corot, and his admiration of him increased day by day; it was the influence of the painter of _The Farm Wagon_ that induced him to render the value of colour tones in accordance with their harmonies rather than their contrasts.

Beginning with _The Verge of an Oasis during the Sirocco_, one can see how Corot’s dexterous and delightful gray came to life again under Fromentin’s brush. “It was a rare distinction,” writes M. Louis Gonse, “in that period of ardent romanticism, to have realized instinctively the value of gray, its caressing softness, its modest yet insistent appeal. Silver gray, amethystine and turquoise gray, these were the tones of which Fromentin was soon vaunting the delicate and tender charm. I remember an interview which I had with him one morning, in his studio, regarding the painter of that unique masterpiece, a _Souvenir of Marissal_. Fromentin was in fine good humour and buoyant spirits. All that he said to me about Corot, his place in art, his daring innovations, his inimitable feeling for light, his exquisite sense of the exact tone, was well worth remembering. It was a marvellous offhand estimate, the substance of which summed up deep-seated convictions. Beneath that flashing, swift-winged flight of words, I felt the earnestness of opinions born of long reflection.”

From 1861 onward, Fromentin deserted the Sahara in favour of Sahel, exchanged the consuming heat of summer for a milder sunshine. “He sought,” recorded Louis Gonse, “to paint in lighter, fresher colours: his instinct counselled him to avoid black as a mortal enemy--that black which certain painters deliberately affect, thinking that in this way they are imitating the old masters. All those soft grays, which are luminous half-tones of white, appeared imperceptibly beneath his brush. After having won distinction as a colourist, he became and remained to the end a master of tonal harmony in the subtlest sense. According to the opinion of Sainte-Beuve, ‘he attained his greatest effects by combining the simplest methods in a marvellous manner.’ And since his ambition was of steady growth, his progress in his craft was uninterrupted.”

Among Fromentin’s productions of this period are: _The Shepherds on the High Plateaus of Kabylia_, an austere spectacle witnessed on the road from Medéah to Boghar; _The Bed of the Oued Mzi_; and the charming canvas of _Turkish Houses in Mustapha-in-Algiers_. In 1863, he produced _The Arab Bivouac at Daybreak_, which, by its presentment of salient details and its sympathetic understanding of the slightest gesture, sets before us the impressive melancholy of the nomad life; he produced further _The_ _Arab Falconer_, one of the most brilliant of his smaller works; and lastly, _Hunting with the Falcon in Algeria_, which many of his admirers regard as his masterpiece, and which, at all events, is his most famous painting. It may now be seen in the collection in the Louvre.

Fromentin repeatedly duplicated, in crayon, in aquarelle, and in oil, this scene which represents two Arab chiefs hunting, accompanied by their attendants. The horseman in the middle of the picture, an old man holding a falcon, resembles, on his motionless horse, an equestrian statue. The second horseman, the one in the foreground, is undoubtedly his son; he is as attractive as a pretty girl and young like the horse he rides, a white horse, of a beautiful, silvery white, the lower part of the legs shading off into an exquisite rose tint. The rider is clad in blue, white, and gray, while a saddle of turquoise blue, enriched with trimmings of glazed vermillion, adorns the courser, which is distinguished by a luxuriant mane, an ample, flowing tail tinged with ochre and amber, and a black eye, profound and full of life. Two Arabs, kneeling in the pathway, have taken possession of a hare which the falcons have just killed. The whole effect is that of extreme distinction, marred perhaps by too much embellishment.

In 1870, Fromentin found his way to Venice. At the first rumours of war, however, he returned precipitately to France, to join his wife and daughter in Paris and take them to Saint-Maurice, his beloved village adjacent to La Rochelle. From Venice, he brought back _The Grand Canal_ and _The Breakwater_, two canvases somewhat leaden in tone, which some critics class in the number of Fromentin’s blunders. The reason may be that they failed to recognize in them the Venice of their dreams, the Venice of tradition, flamboyant and enchanted. But there is another, a tranquillized Venice, which at times allows her fireworks to burn out. Fromentin was not a romantic painter; it was in their hours of repose that he beheld the Grand Canal, the Breakwater, the houses leaning over the water’s brink; and he expressed what he really saw in the midst of a silence that contains a special poetry as well as truth. Fromentin exhibited for the last time in the Salon of 1876--two canvases brought back from Egypt, _The Nile_ and _A Souvenir of Esneh_, canvases distinguished for their “cold, dull colouring, ranging through a neutral scale of violet lights.”

The masterpiece of Fromentin, the picture in which his qualities of composition, drawing, and colour are most clearly revealed, is, in the opinion of all artists--who are alone capable of simultaneously appreciating the art and the craftsmanship of a painting--_Crossing the Ford_. This picture is now in the possession of Mme. Isaac Péreire. Across a canvas measuring little more than two yards, a group of horsemen are journeying through a waste of sand, stretching away in long, pallid dunes, broken here and there by clumps of sombre growth; a swarm of women surrounds them, as light of foot as bees upon the wing. A stream, bordered on the right by tamarinds with sharp, narrow leafage, displays its slender, mirror-like surface. Some of the horses are reserved for the chiefs, while others are laden with burdens of clothing and provisions. The sky, partly clear and partly overcast, occupies the greater portion of the canvas: in the far distance, the swelling curve of the horizon conveys a strong impression of infinity and solitude. The central figures are drawn upon a scale hardly exceeding eight inches in height. The horses, fired with that generous pride which this painter always attributes to them, seem to know their way even better than their riders. They proceed without haste, enjoying the gentle breeze stirring fitfully across the vast expanse, and the time of day, which is growing late. The colour scheme of the picture is bold and conveys an exquisite savour of gold and gray, flickering flames vanishing behind the leafage, as well as along the horizon, as the dusk shuts down. In this picture, Fromentin has produced, with the simplest and most adaptable resources of his palette, a work in which, underneath all the surface charm, the melancholy which abides in the heart of man, and above all in the heart of the Arab, blends harmoniously with the beauty of the world.

IV.--THE MASTER: HIS PERSONALITY AND HIS DESTINY

One of the masters of to-day, of a generous and impulsive nature, who does not wish to be quoted by name, but whose works may be admired in the Luxembourg, consented to give me some information regarding Fromentin, whose pupil he once was. I should like, as a conclusion to this study, to be able to transcribe literally what he told; but at least I shall draw a pious inspiration from his words.

Fromentin laid on his colours very thickly. His solid grounds were always most carefully prepared and his composition calculated in advance down to the smallest detail. At the start, he came under the influence of Decamps, Marilhat, and more especially Delacroix, and in consequence neglected line work, devoting himself solely to the distribution of colours. Delacroix and the romantic school of his time did not interpret Algeria well, because they failed to see it well. They saw it through the black holes of windows, in all the violence of its whites and reds, in the picturesqueness of its costumes and the long stretches of its dusty streets. But Fromentin had visited Italy, and during his excursions across this museum of diverse aspects he made a special study of the effects of sunshine upon the handiwork of man. It was while still saturated with the brilliance and with the art treasures of Italy that he first saw the land of Africa, or rather that he first conceived the desire to learn to know its secrets. Fromentin never put upon his canvases the Africa of the desert, in which there is nothing but the white of the burnoose and the gray of the dune, but Algeria the Fair, Algeria already civilized. He was enraptured by the sight of it and by the penetrating conception, full of eager curiosity, which he had already formed of it. For Fromentin does not command by the audacity of his colours; he commands by the charm of his apportionment of light and shadow, and by the precision of a style which seeks, irrespective of form, to show us the soul of people and of things. He sees with the eyes of a poet, he expresses himself in the manner of a philosopher, he forces us to reflect. He detests all that is vulgar, superfluous, and extravagant. All that pertains to reality has for him a significance, of which he seeks the cause, and for which he frequently discovers a definitive expression.

Through his habit of studying the inner workings of the mind of man, he reached a point, toward the end of his life, when he ceased to compose, even in painting, any works other than those of a man of letters. The keenest intellectual alertness was always ceaselessly pulsating within him. Furthermore, he made a sort of religious cult of life in all its forms, even the most humble, and imbued them with an ennobling charm. And for the purpose of understanding the psychology of a race which enwraps itself jealously in a pride of attitude, the works of Fromentin offer testimony that bears the stamp of rare sincerity and clear-sighted sympathy. His mind never wastes time over the eccentricities of a tribe or a people, but bends its whole effort to gathering up, through a choice of typical details, the general idea, the embodiment of a human group.