PLATE VIII.—A HALT AT AN OASIS
(Musée du Louvre)
The weary caravan has halted, tempted by the verdure of the oasis. Faithful to his manner, Fromentin has taken advantage of this picturesque scene to throw a harmony of colour and light over the men and their surroundings. In all its simplicity, this picture is one of its author’s happiest efforts, because of the impression of life which emanates from this group, relatively so few in number.
Among Fromentin’s pupils was Cormon, an intractable pupil with a marked individuality; yet while he ignored his professional authority, he always proclaimed him, and with real feeling, the most intelligent of masters and the most loyal of men. Fromentin did not exactly conduct a regular art-school. He had gathered around him seven or eight young artists, in whom he foresaw a prosperous future: Gervex, extremely brilliant, Thirion, the most temperamental of them all, Lhermitte and Humbert, who was the master’s favourite. Fromentin saw in Humbert a second self, more fortunate in having a chance to learn at the outset the indispensable rules of his craft, and therefore capable later on of achieving works which he himself could never carry out. Without effort, he won the adoration of his pupils. With an eloquence which came from his heart quite as much as from his brain, he preached to them the doctrine of sincere labour, of disinterested ideals, and of reverence for the past because it has produced the present. He had a combative spirit. He never hesitated to express his opinion about works or about men, since the nobility of his character forbade that he should be suspected of maliciousness or envy. Certain works of his time, that are still discussed and that our own age has consecrated, were displeasing to him: Millet’s, for example. He professed a profound esteem for the man, but he did not admit the technical value of the artist nor the importance of his ideas.
For a long time Fromentin’s rank as a painter was disputed. He proceeded peaceably on his way toward fortune and glory. His literary successes confirmed and enhanced his triumphs as a painter. Through his books his pictures became known and admired by the general public. In 1859, he obtained a First Class Medal and the Cross of the Legion of Honor. The emperor, Napoleon III., invited him to Compiègne. In 1869, his election as Officer of the Legion of Honor followed upon his exhibition of the Fantasia in Algeria and The Halt of the Muleteers. In 1868, he exhibited a very strange and disconcerting picture: Male and Female Centaurs practising at Archery. He wished to show by means of this work, which evoked much comment and criticism, that “the equestrian statue is the last word in human statuary.” “Mingle,” he wrote, “man and horse, give to the rest of the body the combined attributes of alertness and vigour, and you have a being which is supremely strong, thinking and acting, brave and swift, free, and yet docile.” Fromentin’s aristocratic instincts extended from men to things, and even to animals. It was he who in a certain sense discovered the horse, the Arab horse, fine and free, poet of the desert and the sun quite as much as his master. When Fromentin shows him to us with his long silvery tail and his mane quivering like waves, one would say that in the swift flight of his course the artist had lent him wings. “Nevertheless,” writes one critic, “in spite of his intimate acquaintance with the form and the varied coat of the Arab horse, it is perhaps in the little inaccuracies of his drawing of this animal that Fromentin betrays most obviously the defectiveness of his early studies.”
What a pity, let us say once again, that he lacked the time to acquire, while still young, that power and technique in painting which he possessed in literature! Each one of his volumes evoked an outburst of admiration and sympathy. He wrote only when he had something definite to say. His novel, Dominique, fired with the spirit of youth, burning with love and sorrow, was, from the date of its publication, in 1862, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, hailed as a masterpiece.
Not everywhere, however. The poets alone, the born writers, those in whom the habit of psychology and criticism had not extinguished that personal flame which burns within the heart, Sainte-Beuve, for example, and George Sand, recognized it as a work of genius. It was much discussed and even disparaged, by professional writers and critics, even in the Revue des Deux Mondes itself. Emile Montégut, who combined absolute frankness with a wide range of knowledge and keen understanding, while not disputing the literary value of Dominique, did not hesitate to affirm that the book was not a novel, but a series of faultily composed scenes and descriptions, confessions, and memories.
At first, and for some time afterward, the public seemed to ratify this opinion. The volume, issued by Hachette, was bought only at rare intervals and out of curiosity. Later, after this initial failure, it took a fresh start, and to-day is a recognized classic. For, while it is true that this prose poem is lacking in intrigue and that its characters are somewhat overwhelmed by the floods of light from its stage-settings, it diffuses such a redolence of the soil teeming with life, such a fragrance of warm and pure tenderness, that every sensitive and ardent soul delights to yield itself to the harmonious flow of its words and colours.
The Masters of Yesterday has become a breviary for painters who are studying the Flemish and Dutch schools. “The Fromentin revealed in The Masters of Yesterday” asserts Emile Montégut, “is a second Taine, minus the defects for which the latter is reproached, and minus that sort of harshness which comes from the exclusive use of crude colours and a disdain of half-tones. There is also this further difference between them: that Taine puts his battalions of ideas and facts through their manoeuvres with the imperiousness of a general-in-chief commanding an action, while Fromentin assembles and reviews his own with the ease of an orchestra leader directing the instruments under his orders by the simple gesture of his bow.... Just one word is applicable, in point of strict definition, to the temperament and talent of Fromentin: that word is perfection. He strove for it all his life. He deserves to be called the classic of that type of picturesque literature, whose ambition, at the outset, looked toward a very different goal from that of gaining this title, and whose enterprises and audacities the classic school of art could not, as a matter of fact, have beheld without alarm.” This book is, without doubt, Fromentin’s best. For, while the majority of art critics are merely amateurs posing as craftsmen and judges, he knew quite well whereof he spoke. While he understood as well as the others, and even better, an author’s purpose, he could also see of what material and by what means the work of this same artist was composed. He was not a dilettante, endowed with a greater or less amount of taste, but a fellow craftsman, who knew how to mix his own colours and to analyze the palette of another.
His literary works entitled him to a seat in the Académie Française considerably sooner than he could have dreamed of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.