The Masters of Past Time

Eugene Fromentin (1820-76) was born into a prosperous middle-class family in La Rochelle. He had achieved some success as a painter when in 1875 he was invited to write articles on Dutch painting for a journal. He made a trip to Flanders and Holland, and this is his account of that journey. For him the great masters of the past were the early Flemish masters and Rubens, Frans Hals, Rembrandt and the Dutch and genre painters. He visited churches, museums and private collections to study their works, and jotted down his personal impressions on the spot. As a painter himself, Fromentin was absorbed by the technique of the paintings he studied, and he discusses them with directness and simplicity, but also with a subtle and critical intelligence. In his own foreword he modestly outlines his aim: "I shall merely describe, in the presence of certain pictures, the effects of surprise, pleasure, astonishment, and no less exactly of disappointment, which they happened to cause me". Over a hundred years later, Fromentin's reputation as a painter has faded, but this book still lives as a masterpiece of description and evocation.