Meyer Schapiro
FROMENTIN AS A CRITIC
T he Old Masters of Belgium and Holland
is the first and
perhaps the only book of its kind: a critical study of painting by
an accomplished artist who is also a first-rate writer.
As
the author
of the sensitive novel
Dominique
and of
A Summer in the Sahara,
,a masterpiece of travel-writing, Eugene Fromentin has an established
place in French letters. Other novelists and poets have also written
well on painting, but they have lacked Fromentin's knowledge of
the craft, and the few great painters who have left observations on
their art have been unable or unconcerned to give them a decided
literary form. But Fromentin's distinction does not lie simply in the
fact that he combined the painter's experience with the writer's
skill. His book, which speaks so reve<\lingly of the brush-stroke, the
palette and the complicity of tones, is not a learned, technical work;
it has little of the jargon of the studios or the so-called secrets of
the old masters, and where it tries to expound so special a matter
as light "values" or contrast, it is not wholly clear. Fromentin wrote
that he wanted his readers to forget that the author was a painter;
he preferred the role of a "pure dilettante" in the original noble
sense of the word, as if to free himself from practical aims while
contemplating the works of the past. Perhaps he felt also an
aris–
tocratic constraint in talking of a metier. In the end, fortunately, he
could not divest himself altogether of his professional habit. Only
a man for whom painting was a life-preoccupation could look at
pictures with his minute discernment. More than in its craft knowl–
edge, the virtue of the book is
in
the sustained attitude of discrimina–
tion and judgment, resting on keen, tireless observation of the fabric
of the painting as a sensory matter, like the musician's attentiveness
to sounds, but penetrating at the same time with a wonderful power
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