Works by Eugène Fromentin

Eugène Fromentin went to Algeria while still young, and its land and people suggested most of his subjects; the works below include falconers on horseback, camps and horses brought to water.

In The Arab Falconer, of 1864, a galloping rider holds a hawk on his fist, another sits on his head, and a third flies above on a line. Falconry in Algeria: the Kill, of 1863, brings the hunt to the grass, where men kneel over the prey as hawks seize it. In the 1874 Falcon Hunt the riders wait by shallow water, and the birds are specks in a sky that fills more than half the canvas.

He studied under the landscape painter Louis Cabat, and his style owed much to Eugène Delacroix. Upper Egypt, a Recollection, dated 1872, recalls his visit to Cairo in 1869 for the opening of the Suez Canal: women gather by the water under a dark tree, against a sky streaked with orange. His books include Dominique, A Summer in the Sahara and Les Maîtres d'autrefois of 1876, on the Dutch and Flemish old masters.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Ireland, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Clark Art Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée d'Orsay.