The present paper analyses Carnets du voyage en Égypte by a French painter and writer, Eugène Fromentin (1820-1876), using the concept of autobiogeography. The concept allows to examine how the author of a geographical description may be seen throughout this description and how s/he is influenced by the space. The paper argues that the personality of Fromentin emerges from his travel notes even though they are focused mainly on the description of the Egyptian space and the forms “I” or “we” appear there rarely. Three aspects of Fromentin’s personality may be seen through the analyses of his geographical descriptions of Egypt: the Orientalist painter enthusiastic towards the space; the traveler marked by his previous travels to Algeria who in Egyptian spaces sees Algerian ones; and the man who feels old and tired, refuses to discover the Egyptian space and who just wants to come back home.
Eugène Fromentin należy do tych wyjątkowych artystów, którzy odnieśli sukcesy w malarstwie i w literaturze. W swojej epoce odniósł duży sukces dzięki obrazom przedstawiającym algierską przyrodę i obyczaje tego kraju. Utalentowany pisarz, zafascynowany orientalizmem, podróżował do Algierii i Egiptu, by szukać ożywczych impulsów dla własnej wyobraźni, eksploatować go artystycznie i wyobrażeniowo jako rozległą przestrzeń wszelkich możliwości. Przywożąc ze swych podróży na Wschód obrazy będące wyrazem jego samotniczego usposobienia, Fromentin „uzupełnił” we właściwy sobie sposób swe dokonania malarskie, publikując trzy dzienniki podróży: Lato na Saharze (1857), Rok w Sahelu (1859) i Notatki z podróży do Egiptu (1881). W przedmowie do wydania swej drugiej książki podróżniczej, napisał, że celem jego pisarstwa „orientalizującego” nie jest powtarzanie wrażeń malarskich, ale wyrażenie tych odczuć, które może wyrazić wyłącznie słowo. W naszym artykule chcemy pokazać Fromentina jako malarza, pisarza, podróżnika, krytyka sztuki, człowieka wielu talentów, niesłusznie zapomnianego, dla którego malarstwo było impulsem do stworzenia dzieła wielowymiarowego.
EN
Eugène Fromentin belongs to those outstanding artists who achieved successes in both painting and literature. In his epoch, he was greatly successful thanks to his paintings depicting Algerian nature and customs of that country. A talented writer, fascinated with orientalism, he travelled to Algeria and Egypt in order to search for invigorating impulses for his own imagination, to exploit them artistically and imaginatively as a vast space of sundry possibilities. From his travels to the East, Fromentin brought with him paintings being expressions of his solitary disposition and ‘supplemented’ his painting achievements in his unique way by publishing three travel diaries, A Summer in the Sahara (1857), A Year in Sahel (1859) and Notes from the Journey to Egypt (1881). In the preface to his second travel book he wrote that the objective of his ‘orientalising’ writing was not to restate the painting impressions but to express those feelings that only words can express. In our paper we want to show Fromentin as a painter, writer, traveller, art critic, a man of many talents, undeservedly forgotten, for whom painting was an impulse for creating multidimensional works.
The article analyzes the reception of the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting in the Polish postwar literature. The main thesis is that the Polish writers (which frequently were also the painters – e.g. Józef Pankiewicz, Tadeusz Makowski, Jan Cybis, Józef Czapski) look at Jacob van Ruisdael’s or Paulus Potter’s paintings through the prism of the interpretation proposed by Eugène Fromentin in his famous The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland. A different vision of the “realistic” Dutch landscape painting is presented by Zbigniew Herbert, who was an admirer of Jan van Goyen’s monochromatic style. The Polish writer tried to revise the Fromentin’s nineteenth-century conception of Dutch art considered as an exact “portrait of Holland”.
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