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Lot Essay
Influenced by the example of compatriots Delacroix, Decamps and Marilhat, Eugene Fromentin made his first transformative journey to Algeria in 1846, debuting two Orientalist pictures at Salon the following year. He would return to North Africa on numerous occasions throughout his career, and his oeuvre, comprising some 30 years of literary and pictorial material, shows him to be among the more sympathetic and perceptive nineteenth-century observers of Oriental life and culture.
The present picture, Le Rencontre de chefs arabes (1874), showing a meeting between two mounted Arab chiefs set within landscape, can be compared in both subject and composition to a number of late works, notably Le Marchand de cheveaux (1875, fig. 1), Souvenir d’Algerie (1874) and Campement dans la Montagnes de L’Atlas, now in the Walter Art Gallery. Dominating the centre of the picture, an Arab chief sits astride a grey stallion with his left arm akimbo. He converses with another on a bay horse dressed in a dark burnous, and viewed enigmatically from behind. At their feet another man lazes on the ground, and to the left and right in the mid and background further groups of men and horses populate the verdant oasis landscape.
Rather than adopting the taxonomic and ethnographic approach of some of his colleagues, often composed from the comfort of their Parisian studios, and resulting he scoffed, in pictures 'composed like inventories' - Fromentin sought classical, idealized beauty beneath the ostensibly alien façades (Sahel, Oeuvres completes, ed. Guy Sagnes, Paris, 1984, 322). Le Recontre de chefs arabes is a meticulously planned and harmonious composition, the main mounted group at the centre forming a classical pyramid, balanced by the subsidiary figures and the tufts of shrubs in the foreground.
The pictures central subject - that of the noble mounted Arab - was something of a leitmotif in Fromentin’s art, preoccupying him for much of his career. Through careful observation of the Arab and his horse, Fromentin discovered the 'accord of the two most intelligent and fully developed creatures that God has made', evoking the Greek centaur as an analogue for the Arab's perfect communion with his animal (E. Fromentin, Une Année dans le Sahel, Paris, 1963 ed., p. 247).
The close association of Arab man and Arab steed in their natures and appearance is a fundamental to Fromentin's pictures, and both horse and rider are portrayed with the same elegance, power and lean muscularity. Baudelaire remarked that Fromentin had been struck by the patrician dandyism and gravity of Arab tribal chiefs and an important accompanying attribute of those qualities was a sleek horse, `caressed’, like their masters, `with a silk brush’ (A. Silvestre, Portraits et souvenirs, Paris, 1891, p. 123). The sheen of Fromentin's horses was often echoed in the highlights gracing the fine folds of their rider’s hand-woven burnous. This is no more apparent than in the present picture, with the central figure’s flowing white cloak and pink tunic mimicking the tonalities of his horse’s grey coat and bright harness. Fromentin has revealed a surprising source for the sparkling coats of his Arab horses: his close friend Gustave Moreau; `I owe Moreau more than he owes me’, he once told the painter Jules Breton, `He taught me to put the shine on a horse's rump’ (J. Breton, Nos peintres du siècle: l'art et les artistes, Paris, 1899, p. 178).
Focusing on Fromentin's visual language, Henri Focillon, one of France's greatest art historians, excellently invoked the special qualities of Fromentin's best pictures: `His painting is fine, lively, knowledgeable, fresh and singing in its tones: it has beauty when it conserves the looseness of the sketch and the melting energy of a structure of touches...The extreme elegance of vision and of craft refine these cruel knights' (H. Focillion, la peinture aux XIXème et XXème siècles: Du Réalisme à nos jours, Paris, 1927, vol. II, p. 83). Once considered fearsome and barbaric, these Algerian knights are, through Fromentin's brush, as noble as their horses, attired with elegance, illumined with nostalgia.
The present picture, Le Rencontre de chefs arabes (1874), showing a meeting between two mounted Arab chiefs set within landscape, can be compared in both subject and composition to a number of late works, notably Le Marchand de cheveaux (1875, fig. 1), Souvenir d’Algerie (1874) and Campement dans la Montagnes de L’Atlas, now in the Walter Art Gallery. Dominating the centre of the picture, an Arab chief sits astride a grey stallion with his left arm akimbo. He converses with another on a bay horse dressed in a dark burnous, and viewed enigmatically from behind. At their feet another man lazes on the ground, and to the left and right in the mid and background further groups of men and horses populate the verdant oasis landscape.
Rather than adopting the taxonomic and ethnographic approach of some of his colleagues, often composed from the comfort of their Parisian studios, and resulting he scoffed, in pictures 'composed like inventories' - Fromentin sought classical, idealized beauty beneath the ostensibly alien façades (Sahel, Oeuvres completes, ed. Guy Sagnes, Paris, 1984, 322). Le Recontre de chefs arabes is a meticulously planned and harmonious composition, the main mounted group at the centre forming a classical pyramid, balanced by the subsidiary figures and the tufts of shrubs in the foreground.
The pictures central subject - that of the noble mounted Arab - was something of a leitmotif in Fromentin’s art, preoccupying him for much of his career. Through careful observation of the Arab and his horse, Fromentin discovered the 'accord of the two most intelligent and fully developed creatures that God has made', evoking the Greek centaur as an analogue for the Arab's perfect communion with his animal (E. Fromentin, Une Année dans le Sahel, Paris, 1963 ed., p. 247).
The close association of Arab man and Arab steed in their natures and appearance is a fundamental to Fromentin's pictures, and both horse and rider are portrayed with the same elegance, power and lean muscularity. Baudelaire remarked that Fromentin had been struck by the patrician dandyism and gravity of Arab tribal chiefs and an important accompanying attribute of those qualities was a sleek horse, `caressed’, like their masters, `with a silk brush’ (A. Silvestre, Portraits et souvenirs, Paris, 1891, p. 123). The sheen of Fromentin's horses was often echoed in the highlights gracing the fine folds of their rider’s hand-woven burnous. This is no more apparent than in the present picture, with the central figure’s flowing white cloak and pink tunic mimicking the tonalities of his horse’s grey coat and bright harness. Fromentin has revealed a surprising source for the sparkling coats of his Arab horses: his close friend Gustave Moreau; `I owe Moreau more than he owes me’, he once told the painter Jules Breton, `He taught me to put the shine on a horse's rump’ (J. Breton, Nos peintres du siècle: l'art et les artistes, Paris, 1899, p. 178).
Focusing on Fromentin's visual language, Henri Focillon, one of France's greatest art historians, excellently invoked the special qualities of Fromentin's best pictures: `His painting is fine, lively, knowledgeable, fresh and singing in its tones: it has beauty when it conserves the looseness of the sketch and the melting energy of a structure of touches...The extreme elegance of vision and of craft refine these cruel knights' (H. Focillion, la peinture aux XIXème et XXème siècles: Du Réalisme à nos jours, Paris, 1927, vol. II, p. 83). Once considered fearsome and barbaric, these Algerian knights are, through Fromentin's brush, as noble as their horses, attired with elegance, illumined with nostalgia.