2-999-554 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

An Encampment in the Atlas Mountains, c1865. Prosper Dorbec in "L'Hellénisme d'Eugène Fromentin," in the "Gazette des Beaux-Arts," 5th per. 9 (1924): 30-31, singled out Fromentin as a classicist among Orientalists. For the painter-writer, according to Dorbec, the desert and the ramparts of Aïn Mahdy became the plains of Ilium. In this spacious view, characteristic of the artist's production in the mid-sixties, the bold silhouettes of the horsemen, their generalized treatment and the essentially static composition reaffirm the classical character of Fromentin's painting.