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.”