Biographies

Eugène Fromentin (1820 – 1876) He was born at La Rochelle and studied for some years under Louis Cabat. He visited Algieria at the age of 22, and became noted for the pictures he painted showing scenes from North Africa, working both from life and from memory. He returned there in middle life and came away with new matierial. He was also a writer, well known for his orientalist works, such as Un été dans le Sahara (1854) and Une année au Sahel (1858). Baudelaire wrote of Fromentin’s African paintings, “they raise in me an enervating vapor, which soon condenses into desires and regrets.” Fromentin received the first prize at the Salon de Paris in 1859.