Arabs Crossing a Ford

The Artist: A native of La Rochelle in southwestern France, Eugène Fromentin moved to Paris in 1839 to study law. He was increasingly drawn to the arts and eventually devoted himself to the dual calling of painting and writing. In the former sphere, Fromentin worked first under the Neoclassical landscape painter Charles Rémond (1795–1875), a former pupil of Jean Victor Bertin (1767–1842), with whom Fromentin’s father had studied. He then moved on to Louis Cabat (1812–1893), who practiced a more naturalistic mode of landscape painting. Fromentin traveled to Algeria from March 3 to April 18, 1846, and the following year made his debut at the Paris Salon with three paintings, including View in the Gorges of Chiffa (A Region of Algeria).[1] He returned to Algeria from September 24, 1847, until May 23, 1848, and again from November 5, 1852, until October 5, 1853.

Notes made on Fromentin’s latter trips provided material for two books. Un été dans le Sahara (A Summer in the Sahara) first appeared in installments in La revue de Paris in 1854 and was published in book form by Michel Lévy Frères, Paris, in 1857. Une année dans le Sahel (A Year in the Sahel) also appeared in installments, first in L’Artiste in 1857 and then in Revue des deux mondes in 1858, before it was published in book form by Lévy in 1859. Fromentin’s Algerian journeys also furnished the primary subject matter for his paintings, the vast majority of which reflect on the life of the country’s indigenous people in open spaces seemingly untouched by European influence.[2] The artist exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon, receiving second class medals in 1849 and 1857, and a first class medal in 1859, when he was also inducted into the Legion of Honor. He won another first class medal at the Universal Exposition of 1867 and attained the rank of officer of the Legion of Honor in 1869. Official and popular success as a painter was equalled in the realm of writing. Fromentin’s most enduring legacy in any medium may be Les maîtres d’autrefois: Belgique-Hollande (The Masters of the Past: Belgium and Holland), a history of painting from Van Eyck and Memling to Rubens and Van Dyck and extending through the entire seventeenth century in Holland, published in Paris by Editions Plon in 1876, the year of Fromentin’s death.[3]

That Fromentin’s Algerian subjects were painted in the decades after 1830, when France conquered and then colonized Algeria, is critical to appreciation of the artist’s work, which was collected in earnest in Europe and the United States. Fromentin sometimes cast his paintings as souvenirs; their poetic qualities parallel landscapes by his elder contemporary Camille Corot. Perhaps most notably, Fromentin’s work was singled out for praise by Eugène Delacroix, the first French artist to visit North Africa, in 1832. To travel to North Africa and the Middle East, experience a taste of life there firsthand, and subsequently draw on those encounters as a basis for producing art and literature became a rite of passage for countless Europeans in the ensuing decades, serving as a defining feature of a mode of cultural inquiry, production, and consumption known as Orientalism. The term is a relic of the nineteenth century, albeit one that has survived in spite of its antiquated associations for lack of an alternative.

The Painting: Fromentin’s notoriety extended to affluent Americans keen to form art collections at a time when concerns about attribution and authenticity prompted caution about the art of earlier periods. In these circumstances, the prestige of living painters sanctioned by success at the Paris Salons afforded an ample selection of artworks, whose scope all but defined the parameters of taste for contemporary art in the United States. That this was the situation in the late nineteenth century underlies the presence today of paintings by Fromentin in museum collections throughout the country, including the present work, which was made to order in 1873 for New Yorker Catharine Lorillard Wolfe (1828–1887).[4] Fromentin was then going through a period of self doubt. Typecast as a painter of North Africa, he had essayed other themes—scenes of Venice and mythological subjects—but these were poorly received. Moreover, financial pressures compelled him to produce the North African scenes on which his reputation was established. In October 1873, from his home at Saint-Maurice near La Rochelle, he lamented to his painter-friend Charles Busson (1822–1908):

“. . . Totally unlike you, what I’m doing is neither great nor for glory. I arrived here with a big hole in my budget and was concerned only with filling part of it. I dug every day, as a conscientious worker and a father, perhaps preoccupied to excess with heavy responsibilities.

So, I will bring back seven, eight, or nine small paintings, all small, neither good nor bad, devoid of spirit, made with sufficient care, done just neatly enough to be excusable. Most are very far along; a few are signed. I would not want to leave Saint-Maurice before all of them were beyond question, so that I may be free, upon arriving in Paris, to get to more serious work . . . .”[5]

Arabs Crossing a Ford is closely related to a far larger painting known as A River Crossing, an undated work, whose origins and history have not yet come to light.[6] There is no definitive clue to the sequence of the two works. The treatment of the landscape in The Met picture is sketchlike, whereas in the larger version, as James Thompson and Barbara Wright have observed, the setting is rendered in an uncharacteristically hard-edged and stiff manner.[7] There are counterparts in A River Crossing for all the figures in Arabs Crossing a Ford, but staffage in the latter painting is reduced in number. Absent in Arabs Crossing a Ford are two prominently placed camels, as are ethnographic details such as the tall, wide-brimmed straw hat at the very left of A River Crossing. The horse at the center is chestnut in A River Crossing but white in Arabs Crossing a Ford, strenghtening its position as the picture’s focal point. Future research may clarify the relationship between the paintings.

Early writers were not of the same mind about Arabs Crossing a Ford. Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer (1887) wrote: “while possessing the individual charm for which he [Fromentin] gave to all his works, [it] is a late specimen, weaker in conception than those he painted before the troubles of France had broken his spirit and damped his ardor, and gaudier and less sincere in color. It is a hundred miles away in excellence from the best example of Fromentin’s best days of which I know in America—the one which hangs in Mr. Schaus’s private gallery.”[8] By contrast, and contrary to the artist’s assessment, Sophia Antoinette Walker (1894) described the painting as “spirituelle [sic], full of grace, movement, and melting color,” continuing, “[h]e is a rare painter of horses, not representing their movement as seen by the kinetoscope, but by the human eye.” William Sharp (1898) complimented the painting’s beauty, which he attributed to its reserve and delicacy, describing the work as a “sketch.” Another critic, Frank Fowler (1908), wrote that Fromentin “is well seen in a little picture entitled ‘Arabs Crossing a Ford.’ His palette vibrates with delicious and pure color, in spite of a certain ficelle or method of painting which he has evidently evolved to secure particular effects, namely, the superposing of atmospheric tones on an under preparation of tender browns for mountains and distances. This method pervades all his work; but it must be admitted that in his hand it is highly successful. The movement, delicate drawing of horses and riders, and the opalescent charm of the color make of this picture a veritable gem.” What does not seem to have registered with any of the critics is whether and to what degree Arabs Crossing a Ford bore a cultural or historical context. They all appear to have regarded it as a picturesque but essentially generic scene of nomadic life in the Arab world. It is impossible to gauge Wolfe’s own response in this respect.

Catharine Lorillard Wolfe’s bequest of contemporary European art to The Met included, in addition to Arabs Crossing a Ford, a representative selection of French Orientalist paintings, including: A Bashi-Bazouk, by Charles Bargue (87.15.102), An Egyptian Peasant Woman and Her Child, by Léon Bonnat (87.15.97), The Turkish Patrol, by Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (87.15.93), Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, by Charles-Théodore Frère (87.15.106), and Prayer in the Mosque, by Jean-Léon Gérôme (87.15.130).

Asher Miller 2023

[1] 1846, oil on canvas, 23 1/2 x 19 in. (60 x 48 cm), private collection (sold Christie’s, London, March 23, 1984, no. 90).
[2] Considerable scholarship is devoted to representations of Algeria in nineteenth-century art. See, for example, John Zarobell, Empire of Landscape: Space and Ideology in French Colonial Algeria, University Park, Penn., 2010, esp. ch. 4, “Eugène Fromentin and Laughouat: Artistic and Colonial Frontiers.”
[3] Portions of the foregoing text are adapted verbatim from Miller 2022.
[4] For the ubiquity of Fromentin’s work in the United States in the late nineteenth century, see John Denison Champlin, Jr., ed., and Charles C. Perkins, critical ed., Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings, New York, 1892, vol. 2, pp. 95–96.
[5] “. . . Tout au contraire de vous, ce qui je fais n’est ni grand ni pour la gloire. Je suis arrivé ici avec un grand trou dans mon budget et ne me suis préoccupé que d’en boucher une partie. J’ai pioché tous les jours et toute le jour, comme un conscienscieux ouvrier et comme un père de famille préoccupé peut-être à l’excès de lourdes responsabilités. / Je rapporterai donc sept, huit ou neuf petits tableaux, tous petits, ni bien, ni mal, pas spirituels, assez soignés, tout juste assez proprement faits pour être excusables. La plupart sont très avancés, quelques-uns sont signés. Je ne voudrais pas quitter Saint-Maurice avant que tous ne fussent hors de question, afin d’être libre, en arrivant à Paris, de mettre à des travaux plus graves . . . .“ Correspondance d’Eugène Fromentin, t. 2, 1859–1876; Textes Réunis, Classés et Annotés par Barbara Wright, [Paris], 1995, pp. 1808–9 (letter 1172).
[6] Oil on canvas, 40 ¾ x 55 ¾ in. (103.5 x 141.6 cm); whereabouts unknown (sold Christie’s, London, June 21, 2001, no. 16).
[7] See Thompson and Wright 2008.
[8] By France’s “troubles” the author is referring to defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870) and the Paris Commune (1871). Schaus’s painting is unidentifed.

Inscription: Signed and dated (lower right): -Eug.-Fromentin.-73-

Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, New York (1873–d. 1887; bought from the artist)

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Taste of the Seventies," April 2–September 10, 1946, no. 108.

Hartford, Conn. Wadsworth Atheneum. "The Romantic Circle: French Romantic Painting, Delacroix and his Contemporaries," October 15–November 30, 1952, no. 58.

Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], ed. The Art Treasures of America. Philadelphia, [1880], vol. 1, p. 134.

Montezuma [Montague Marks]. "My Note Book." Art Amateur 16 (May 1887), p. 122.

Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer. "The Wolfe Collection at the Metropolitan Museum. II." Independent 39 (November 24, 1887), p. 9, considers it a lesser work by the artist.

Walter Rowlands. "The Miss Wolfe Collection." Art Journal, n.s., (January 1889), p. 13.

Sophia Antoinette Walker. "Fine Arts: The Painting Master in the Wolfe Collection." Independent 46 (August 2, 1894), p. 12.

"The Metropolitan Museum of Art—The French Painters." New York Times (May 22, 1895), p. 4.

William Sharp. "The Art Treasures of America (Concluded.)." Living Age, 7th ser., 1 (December 3, 1898), p. 604, notes that it was purchased from the artist by Wolfe in 1873.

Frank Fowler. "The Field of Art: Modern Foreign Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, Some Examples of the French School." Scribner's Magazine 44 (September 1908), p. 382.

Josephine L. Allen and Elizabeth E. Gardner. A Concise Catalogue of the European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1954, p. 39.

Charles Sterling and Margaretta M. Salinger. French Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 2, XIX Century. New York, 1966, p. 157, ill.

James Thompson and Barbara Wright. La vie et l'œuvre d'Eugène Fromentin. Paris, 1987, p. 283, ill.

Katharine Baetjer. European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born Before 1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1995, p. 429, ill.

Barbara Wright. Eugène Fromentin: A Life in Art and Letters. Bern, 2000, p. 494, lists it among works of 1873 that Fromentin painted primarily for financial reasons.

James Thompson and Barbara Wright. Eugène Fromentin, 1820–1876: Visions d'Algérie et d'Égypte. 2nd rev. ed. [1st ed., 1987]. Paris, 2008, pp. 362, 383, ill., note the similarity of its composition to that of another Fromentin painting (about 1873; sold at Christie's, London, June 21, 2001, no. 16).

Asher Ethan Miller. French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan. Kansas City, 2022, unpaginated, n. 18 [https://doi.org/10.37764/78973.5.406.5407].