Changing perceptions of life in Algeria, as seen in the work of two nineteenth-century writer-painters: Eugène Fromentin and Gustave Guillaumet

ABSTRACT

Like Eugène Fromentin, Gustave Guillaumet, his junior by 20 years, was a distinguished Orientalist painter and writer. Fromentin, in some of his major paintings, revisited themes that he had treated earlier in his travel writings, Un été dans le Sahara (1854) and Une année dans le Sahel (1857). Conversely, Guillaumet revisited some of his earlier paintings in serialised essays, published as “Tableaux algériens”, in La Nouvelle Revue of 1880; these texts were republished posthumously in book form, with illustrations, in 1888. The differing approaches of these two peintres-écrivains are central to the evolution of word–image relationships in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their work, at one level, was intended to track the military progress of the French colonial army in Algeria and, at another level, to evoke details of daily life in the sedentary and nomadic peoples of that country. In so doing, they testify to the greatness of nineteenth-century French Orientalist painting, in terms of visual perspective, while, at the same time, heralding its decline, inasmuch as excessive accuracy of representation came dangerously close to ethnography, as opposed to art – a danger signalled by Duranty, in La Nouvelle Peinture (1870), and later by Fromentin, in Les Maîtres d’autrefois (1876).

KEYWORDS:

• Eugène Fromentin
• Gustave Guillaumet
• Duranty
• colonisation
• Orientalism
• visual writing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All unattributed English translations in this essay are those of the author.

2 For an illustration of this painting, see Guégan (2003, 185). All subsequent references to this work will be designated “DR”.

3 See Frémeaux 1993 (in particular the chapter entitled “Les Officiers ‘Maîtres Jacques de la colonisation’”, 33–75).

4 In the course of his second Algerian journey, Fromentin also met Oscar MacCarthy, son of an Irish officer in the Napoleonic army. MacCarthy was commissioned, in 1848, to establish a geographical, historical and geological survey of Algeria, the first stage in what was to become a lifetime's work, concluded in 1863. A fascinating personality in his own right, MacCarthy was known as the “Grey Eminence of the Sahara”, so deep was his knowledge of the language, the terrain and the culture of the many different people making up this new colony. In 1860, he was appointed Director of the Library and of the Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers and, later again, was one of the advisers of Charles Foucault. An article by Oscar MacCarthy on Laghouat in 1853, for the Almanach de l’Algérie (1854), is reproduced in both of Anne-Marie Christin's editions of Fromentin's Un été dans le Sahara (1981, 252–255, 2009, 367–373). He and Chevarrier appear, in fictionalised form, as Vandell (or, in the manuscript version, “O’Brien” – a name as Irish as MacCarthy). In the context of the expedition to Lake Haloula and Tipaza, Vandell expressed the military point of view, from which Fromentin sought to distance himself.

5 There is doubt as to the background of Carrus: his first name, Hassan, would imply that he was of Arabic origin, although Eugène Daumas claims he was Jewish. One set of military records shows him as born in Algiers, another in Marseilles. He was, in any case, one of many people, of modest background and little instruction, who swarmed round the new French colonists in Algeria (Frémeaux 1993, 71).

6 References to the books of Daumas are legion in the travel accounts of Fromentin and have been studied in depth by Jean-Pierre Lafouge (1988, 83–135). Lafouge concludes that the credibility of Fromentin's account derives in large part from its sources in the more factual work of Daumas, which, however, the artist transforms imaginatively and rhetorically. Fromentin's local guide to southern Algeria, Mohammed el Chaâmbi (see Fromentin 1984, 1299), was also Daumas's main informant about the desert, although Fromentin's satirical treatment of this figure undermines the credibility of Daumas's presentation and marks the distancing of the disciple from his master.

7 For an illustration of this painting, see James Thompson and Barbara Wright (2008, 285). All subsequent references to this work will be designated “ACR”.

8 A manuscript variant makes this clear. The bullet holes in the walls of the town distracted Fromentin from engaging with the scene as a painter, drawing him instead into “a gory adventure that [he] was trying to forget” (“une aventure sanglante que je m’efforçais d’oublier”) (Fromentin 1984, 1303).

9 “there is perhaps nobody who has conveyed with greater clarity than the painter Guillaumet the transformations [in Algeria]” (“nul ne s’est peut-être plus nettement rendu compte des transformations [en Algérie] que le peintre Guillaumet” [Braudel 1996, 104]).

10 For an illustration of this painting, see Christine Peltre (1997, 153).

11 Fromentin turned down requests to this effect by Marshal Victor de Castellane in 1859 (Fromentin 1995, 1137), by the publisher, Jules Hetzel, in 1864 (Fromentin 1995, 1344–1345) and by the sculptor, Ernest Christophe, in 1869 (Fromentin 1995, 1535).

12 Charles Baudelaire (1976, 650); English translation by Jonathan Mayne, in Baudelaire (1955, 264).

13 English translation by Blake Robinson, in Fromentin (2004, 11), henceforth designated as “BSS”.

14 Michael Heffernan sees this painting as “consciously ambiguous”: pessimistically, it might be seen in terms of “desolation and abandonment, by adding false hope that the forces of civilisation are at hand”; more optimistically, the scene on the horizon may be interpreted as a “procession”, ultimately capable of bringing about transformative change, in the sense that modern Europe can bring the desert to life and “save its inhabitants from oblivion” (1991, 40–42). John Zarobell (2010, 146–148) further explores this argument. It is difficult, however, to subscribe to Heffernan's reading, earlier in his article, of Fromentin's Le Pays de la soif as “a plea for the reconstituted imperial France to rescue the dying civilisation of Algeria” (1991, 40).

15 English translation by Edward Marsh, in Fromentin (1948a, 18).

16 After the first public showing in 1893, the painting was again exhibited in 1899, at the “Rétrospective Guillaumet” in the Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, as part of the “6^e Exposition des peintres orientalistes français”. By now, however, the events on which the painting was based had lost their topicality. The third and final public showing of the 1864 painting was in 1906, at the “Exposition coloniale nationale de Marseille”, the first colonial exhibition organised in France.

17 English translation, BSS, 12–14.

18 Victor Hugo, Préface ([1829] 1968, 322).

19 English translation, BSS, 21.

20 English translation by Andrew Boyle, in Fromentin (1948b, 158).