Fromentin

Georges Beaume

Fromentin

I. – THE FIRST STEPS

EUGÈNE-SAMUEL-AUGUSTE FROMENTIN-DUPEUX was born at La Rochelle on the twenty-fourth of October, 1820. His family was a very old one and held in high honour throughout Aunis and Saintonge.

Aunis, one of the ancient provinces of France, glows languidly beneath the caresses of a humid sun, enveloped in a thin veil of ocean mists, and at times she seems to float in the midst of her waves and her sands, beneath a sky bounded by remote and indeterminate horizons, vague and immense, like some vast wreckage overgrown with gardens and oases. For more than a century, she was downtrodden by the English. But if she owes them the pain and humiliation of defeat, they at least inspired her with a passion for commercial greatness and a desire for wealth. Through her shipowners and bankers, she amassed riches that permitted her to devote a goodly share of her days to leisure and festivities, for the betterment of her material welfare and the embellishment of her mind. Thus in the midst of this industrious community, faithful to its duties, jealous of its liberty, there was slowly formed a powerful and cultured bourgeois class, eager for all forms of intellectual improvement.

Eugène Fromentin’s family was, on the father’s side, attached by ancient roots to the soil of Aunis. His ancestors were nearly all of them lawyers and judges, and as far back as they can be traced, even to the beginning of the eighteenth century, formed a part of this bourgeois class, which, in that region of ardent Protestantism, constituted a sort of aristocracy.

His father was a physician of great ability, and for thirty-three years was director of the Lafond insane asylum, which he had founded not far from La Rochelle. He had a reputation for wit, but indecision and suspicion stifled the better impulses of his nature. Fromentin’s mother, whose educational advantages had been slight, had by contrast a sensitive and warmhearted disposition. It was she whom the painter resembled in all the details of his physical nature and in all the qualities of his moral nature, while Charles, his elder brother, practical and taciturn, resembled their father, whose vocation he followed.

The mentality of Eugène Fromentin developed early. At school, he surprised all his instructors by his ability to assimilate knowledge and to think things out for himself, and he was loved by them all. Later on, he confessed that “his childhood had been very lively, almost boisterous.” But somewhere during his fifteenth year, a marked change took place in him. “I had involuntarily formed the habit,” he confessed further, “of reserve and silence, a habit that was often to my disadvantage, and which was respected quite as much through pity as through tolerance. Yet it is to this habit that I owed the chance to develop in accordance with my nature; otherwise, I should have grown up warped and unfit.” And M. Pierre Blanchon, from whose admirably documented volume1 these details are borrowed, adds further: “His views upon art and poetry clashed with the bourgeois ideas of his environment; the doctor looked upon them as mere nonsense, while his mother feared that they would lead him into temptation.” As a matter of fact, at the very period when he was passing through the moral crisis of adolescence, a romantic attachment shook his soul to its very depths with the emotions of love.

About half a league from town, just before entering the village of Saint-Maurice, the Fromentins owned a country place. The country roundabout is nothing but a level plain, fertile and bare, stretching away to the coast, where the sea, harnessed by Richelieu, loses, among its encroaching capes and islands, all its grandeur and poetry. Among their country neighbours there happened to be a certain Madame X., left, at the age of forty-three, the widow of a captain in the merchant marine. She spent her winters at La Rochelle and her summers at Saint-Maurice. She had a daughter, born at Port Louis, in the island of Martinique, in 1817, and consequently three years older than Eugène Fromentin. Madeleine – let us, from a feeling of pious respect, refer to her only by the name she bears in Dominique– Madeleine, being of Creole blood on her mother’s side, had the darkest of hair and eyes, combined with a fair and almost colourless complexion. We know next to nothing about her. He had conceived for her a violent attachment. Brusquely, she was snatched from the heaven in which the secret hopes and dreams of his fifteen years had framed her. She became the wife of an assistant collector of taxes. Fromentin suffered impotently from jealousy, and all the more because his passion was sincere and ingenuous. His light-heartedness vanished, together with his self-assurance; he mistrusted his own sentiments, he probed and analyzed his thoughts. To retire to the comforting privacy of his fireside and bury himself in literary work, poetry, critical essays, fragments of drama, such was his way of healing his wounds.

Some of these productions of his adolescence reveal him as a student well grounded in rhetoric, very serious-minded and painstaking, nurtured on the solid substance of the best classics, and possessed of an uneasy spirit, in which there had already awakened a taste for big, fundamental ideas, together with a goading ambition to achieve, through his own unaided efforts, some creative work of beauty. Furthermore, these early efforts show a great facility of expression, an abundant and substantial eloquence that seeks distinction, not by affecting strange mannerisms, but by frankly employing the simplest of methods.

Having completed his college course, Fromentin lived for a year somewhat at haphazard. His literary efforts became known in La Rochelle, and before long won him the esteem of the numerous men of letters who, in those days, to us the legendary days of the post-chaise and stage-coach, were drawn to a city where the social life was so distinctive and so intense. From time to time, he would steal out in the evening and furtively slip a manuscript in prose or verse into the letter-box of the Journal de La Rochelle. The next morning the poem or story or critical paragraph would appear, without signature, in the columns of the journal. But everyone who read it would, without hesitation, mentally sign the name of Fromentin.

He was now beginning to sketch and paint. The morose doctor, his father, who was himself an amateur artist of no mean ability, initiated him into the rudiments of the craft. The hour had come, however, for choosing some serious career for the lad. Charles was in Paris, studying medicine. Eugène was piloted in the direction of the law. He left La Rochelle in November, 1839, not without some pangs, for he was leaving behind him, perhaps forever, the woman whom he had worshipped with all his soul; and, sensitive and nervous as he was, he experienced a genuine dread of invading unknown territory, the huge city of Paris, so far away from his own kindly province, which had been so indulgent to his early efforts, so tender to the first dreams of his heart. At this time, his figure was slender and well proportioned, save that he was somewhat too short in the leg. His head was comparatively a trifle large. His pale complexion was at times tinged with a faint flush. His long brown hair fell upon his shoulders. His cheeks were full, the contour of his face formed a fine, elongated oval. His lips, surmounted by a budding moustache, were heavy; his forehead high and rounded and very handsome. His nose, which in later years filled out and assumed an aquiline form, was at that time perfectly straight. His eyes, beneath well-formed eyebrows, were brown, and perhaps somewhat too large, but very attractive and very gentle, far more so than they were later on; in moments of enthusiasm, which in those days were fairly frequent, or when under the influence of astonishment or sadness, he would raise them towards heaven with an expression of profundity.

In Paris, he lived at first by himself and in seclusion. His aversion to vulgarity and extravagances of speech or manners was ridiculed by some of his comrades, who nicknamed him “little Monsieur Comme-il-faut.” He followed the courses in the law school only halfheartedly, but was assiduous in his attendance at the lectures of Michelet, Quinet, and Sainte-Beuve, in the Sorbonne.

As a connoisseur of the beautiful in human handiwork, Fromentin soon learned to love Paris and to appreciate, in her environs, Versailles, Saint-Germain, Montmorency, those picturesque landscapes that combine the charm of nature with the glorious high-lights of history. Although without a teacher, he spent more and more time in sketching the changing forms of life, and strove, so far as it lay in him, to retain in his drawings the secret tremors of the soul. “These are his first stumbling utterances as a landscape painter,” wrote M. Louis Gonse in his extensive and admirable work, critical as well as biographical, in which he has reproduced the earliest known sketch by Fromentin, a scene from Chatterton, drawn the morning after a performance of De Vigny’s drama at the Théâtre Française. This pen-and-ink sketch, dated April 2, 1841, shows facility, sureness of touch, and a certain felicity in composition.

Far from relinquishing his literary efforts, Fromentin applied himself, from this time onward, with increased ardour, and, throwing off the trammels of romanticism, produced poems, critical studies, and even a comedy, written in collaboration with his friend, Emile Deltrémieux.

From this time onward, Fromentin held firmly to a conviction on which all his efforts as painter and author were destined to be based: namely, that an artist, instead of imitating the masters, should draw his inspiration solely from himself, from his own emotions and memories, and that, if he aspires to speak sincerely, in a new and original language, he ought to belong to some one country, to reflect its image and to repeat its accent. As a matter of fact, he himself was not, excepting in appearance, uprooted from his native soil. In the depths of his inmost consciousness, there always resounded the echo of his province.

But for the time being, while he amused himself in studying the reasons for things and administering to himself doses of his own keen analysis, he suffered from that curious affliction of dual personality which, twenty-five years later, he described in Dominique: “That cruel gift of being able to look on at one’s own life as at a performance given by someone else. Sensibility is an admirable gift; in the order of creation it may become a rare power, but on one condition: namely, that one does not turn it against oneself.”

Having taken his licentiate’s degree, Fromentin pursued his studies for the doctorate. He entered the law office of M. Denormandie. There he met, as fellow clerks, the future lawyer, M. Nicolet, and Forcade de la Roquette, destined later to become minister. Here Fromentin spent his time chiefly in drawing sketches on the desk pads, the margins of legal pleadings, and even the panels of the doors. One day he descended into the courtyard and covered the coach-house, stable, and party-wall with his artistic efforts. He paid long and frequent visits to the Louvre. The Italian school left him wellnigh indifferent. In the French school he ranked Chardin above all the rest. But already his chief enthusiasm was reserved for the Dutch. The Ford, by Wynauts, with figures by Berchem, and Ruysdaël’s Sunstroke and Dyke beaten by the Sea fascinated him. At times, he conceived a fine passion for Rubens. Rembrandt, however, from first to last, was very nearly, if not quite, incomprehensible to him. “He reproached Ingres,” records M. Louis Gonse, “for being an imitator of Raphael; nevertheless, he declared, after seeing one of Ingres’ sketches, that he was a sculptor of the first order. As regards music, he knew Mozart and Beethoven only by reputation; he loved Bellini, Donizetti, etc., and the entire sensualistic school of Rossini.”

Apparently Fromentin was now hesitating between two paths, that of the fine arts and that of belles-lettres. It is my own deep conviction that his choice had already been made. He knew that literature, worthily conceived and liberally practised, cannot become a career capable of supporting the man who follows it. He saw daily, with his wise and prudent judgment, that painting, on the contrary, can guarantee bread and fuel to an artist of real talent, respectful of his art and loyal in his efforts. Accordingly, he wrote henceforth in his leisure hours, and when the mood was on him, economizing his strength and hoping only that the art of his written word might attract attention and perhaps awaken sympathy.

At last, unable to endure any longer the legal dust of M. Denormandie’s office, he boldly confided to a friend of the family his horror of judicial procedure, and confessed his desire to devote himself wholly to painting. This friend, Charles Michel, promptly went to La Rochelle, to open negotiations with Dr. Fromentin; and the latter, after a vigorous protest, ended by yielding. But, priding himself on his knowledge of such matters, he insisted upon choosing Eugène’s instructor, and selected the painter Rémond, who at that time represented the academic school of landscape painting. Fortunately for him, Eugène did not remain long in Rémond’s studio, but left it to enter that of Cabat. A correct and careful artist, and one of the best, next to Dupré and Rousseau, Cabat had opened a new path for landscape painting – a path in which it would not be very hard to discover the influence which this celebrated master of the landscape exerted over the earlier manner of his pupil, through his sympathetic understanding of his subjects and the grace and distinction of his art.

II. – THE PROMISED LAND

In the month of March, 1846, Fortune suddenly smiled upon Eugène Fromentin. His friend, Charles Labbé, the orientalist-painter, was starting to attend his sister’s wedding at Blidah. Fromentin, in whom an ardent curiosity regarding the lands of sunshine had been awakened by an exhibition of aquarelles, brought back from the East by Labbé himself, by Delacroix, Decamps, and notably by Marilhat, enthusiastically accepted his friend’s invitation to accompany him. Had he some intuition that a new world of sensations and of colours awaited him in Algeria? He set forth, without even notifying his family, light of pocketbook, but buoyant with hope and faith. To his dazzled eyes, to his soul seething with ambition, it proved to be literally the promised land. Within two days after his arrival at Blidah, he wrote: “Everything here interests me. The more I study nature here, the more convinced I am that, in spite of Marilhat and Decamps, the Orient is still waiting to be painted. To speak only of the people, those that have been given us in the past are merely bourgeois. The real Arabs, clothed in tatters and swarming with vermin, with their wretched and mangy donkeys, their ragged, sun-ravaged camels, silhouetted darkly against those splendid horizons; the stateliness of their attitudes, the antique beauty of the draping of all those rags – that is the side which has remained unknown… In short, from the point of view of my work, I have nothing to complain of, and at the rate at which I am progressing, I can promise you that I shall bring back a fairly interesting sketch-book.”

He was especially appreciative of Marilhat and Decamps; the absolutely new brilliance of their works haunted him constantly, in the midst of his own labours. “That talented pair, Marilhat and Decamps, so Théophile Gautier writes me, are oddly close neighbours, yet they do not trespass on each other’s ground; where the one has the advantage in fantasy, the other offsets it in character.”

Reinstalled in Paris, Fromentin painted with desperate zeal, lacking the gift, so he said, of inventing what he had not seen. He forced himself to escape from that spirit of imitation which is at once a pleasure and a danger, and up to the present he had accomplished nothing save to rid himself of those borrowed qualities which he had acquired, without succeeding in gaining others which he could call his own. He had, however, learned – and this knowledge is an essential virtue of every artist – that the real masters have never attempted to reproduce any object actually, but only the spirit which animates it to the point of rendering it a treasury of life and of beauty; he learned, day by day, more thoroughly, that poetry is everywhere, like the spark in the flint; that the artist must study technique from the masters and truth from nature, but that he can find nowhere, except within himself, the innate image of beauty. In 1847, he sent to the Salon, which at that time was held in the Louvre, three little pictures, which were unanimously accepted: A Farm in the Outskirts of La Rochelle, A Mosque near Algiers, The Gorges of Chiffa. “The first of the pictures,” says M. Gonse, “is characteristic of Fromentin’s earliest manner. Looked at only from the surface, it is heavy and pasty. It was a timid work, but in nowise silly or vulgar. The Gorges of Chiffa forms the curtain-raiser to Fromentin’s Algeria.” But Fromentin was exercising more and more his power of self-analysis; he knew that his paintings were nothing more than a certain equilibrium of secondary qualities, approximately correct in design and agreeable in colour, but destitute of motive power. He had also learned the cause of alteration in certain tones; the colours which he had been employing were not susceptible of combination. “He had learned that mineral blue and indian yellow, combined with white, especially with white of lead, turned black and produced a leaden tone … also that paint was less enduring on white canvas than on canvas already prepared with a ground colour.”

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.