FROMENTIN, Eugène.

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Sahara & Sahel. First illustrated edition, bringing together the author's two highly regarded and influential Arab travelogues, first published 1856 and 1858, with a selection of his masterful visual evocations of desert life. This from the edition de luxe of 208, one of four large paper copies on papier Chine constituting, with four on Japon, the tirage de tête.Fromentin (1820-76) was intended for the law, but persuaded his father to let him study art in Paris. In search of more exotic subject matter, he first visited Algeria in 1846, returning in 1852 with his wife, settling at Laghouat, an oasis on the northern edge of the Sahara. The portfolio of sketches with which he returned were to provide the foundations of a successful artistic career; while his journals and letters were the source for his first literary successes. On publication of his diaries in La Revue de Paris Fromentin was commended as both artist and author by literary critic Saint-Beuve "He has two muses. He is a painter in two languages, an amateur in neither, he is a conscientious artist, fine and severe in both". He later expanded his range with Les Maîtres d'autrefois, a study of Dutch Golden Age painting much admired by Bernard Berenson, and recognised as perhaps the first work of modern art criticism; and Dominique, his only work of fiction, one of the major psychological novels of nineteenth-century French literature.Fromentin's desert studies have inevitably been subsumed in the general criticism of

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