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Charles Henry Fromuth
1858–1937
BirthplacePhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Death placeConcarneau, France
BiographyExpatriate artist Charles Henry Fromuth specialized in portrayals of the sky, water, and boats of the harbor in his adopted home of Concarneau, a fishing village on the coast of the French province of Brittany. The son of German-speaking immigrants, Fromuth grew up in a working-class section of Philadelphia. He first exercised his natural penchant for drawing by working in a commercial lithography shop. At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, beginning in 1877, Fromuth became a student and devoted follower of Thomas Eakins, a progressive teacher and iconoclastic realist artist who encouraged individual expression.
By 1889, Fromuth had accumulated sufficient funds from textile design and model making to travel to Paris for further study. He was disappointed with the instruction at the Académie Julian, where he studied under renowned academic figure painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905), but he was deeply inspired by the rich tonalities and dramatic brushwork of some of the old master artists, notably Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69), whose works he viewed in museums. To economize, Fromuth sought an inexpensive locale outside the metropolis. In 1890 he settled in Concarneau, already a busy international artists’ colony, where he remained for the rest of his life.
The fishing village’s busy harbor became Fromuth’s perennial subject. Focusing on the sardine boats, rippling waters, and changing effects of sunlight and clouds, the artist began creating his marine images in oil and in the drawing media of charcoal and pastel, a soft, crumbly stick of rich, dense color. When he began submitting his work for juried exhibitions in Paris, beginning in 1890, Fromuth’s drawings were accepted while his paintings were rejected, and after 1895 he abandoned oil painting altogether. His harbor drawings incorporate the high horizons and flat, asymmetrical compositions of Japanese prints as well as the slashing strokes, unmodulated color, and on-site execution characteristic of impressionism, widely accepted among both European and American artists beginning in the 1890s.
Among his European and American artistic contemporaries, Fromuth was respected as a master of pastel drawing. A touring exhibition of his work in America in 1910 was a commercial failure, however, and he exhibited little thereafter. Except for periodic visits to Paris to view the exhibitions, he lived a somewhat reclusive life in Concarneau, associating with visiting artists and supporting himself by occasional sales of his work to tourists. Convinced that his art would eventually come to be valued, Fromuth left a carefully organized cache of work as well as a long account of his career to his brother’s family. His art was rediscovered in the 1980s with the revival of interest in late-nineteenth-century American expatriate artists.
By 1889, Fromuth had accumulated sufficient funds from textile design and model making to travel to Paris for further study. He was disappointed with the instruction at the Académie Julian, where he studied under renowned academic figure painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905), but he was deeply inspired by the rich tonalities and dramatic brushwork of some of the old master artists, notably Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69), whose works he viewed in museums. To economize, Fromuth sought an inexpensive locale outside the metropolis. In 1890 he settled in Concarneau, already a busy international artists’ colony, where he remained for the rest of his life.
The fishing village’s busy harbor became Fromuth’s perennial subject. Focusing on the sardine boats, rippling waters, and changing effects of sunlight and clouds, the artist began creating his marine images in oil and in the drawing media of charcoal and pastel, a soft, crumbly stick of rich, dense color. When he began submitting his work for juried exhibitions in Paris, beginning in 1890, Fromuth’s drawings were accepted while his paintings were rejected, and after 1895 he abandoned oil painting altogether. His harbor drawings incorporate the high horizons and flat, asymmetrical compositions of Japanese prints as well as the slashing strokes, unmodulated color, and on-site execution characteristic of impressionism, widely accepted among both European and American artists beginning in the 1890s.
Among his European and American artistic contemporaries, Fromuth was respected as a master of pastel drawing. A touring exhibition of his work in America in 1910 was a commercial failure, however, and he exhibited little thereafter. Except for periodic visits to Paris to view the exhibitions, he lived a somewhat reclusive life in Concarneau, associating with visiting artists and supporting himself by occasional sales of his work to tourists. Convinced that his art would eventually come to be valued, Fromuth left a carefully organized cache of work as well as a long account of his career to his brother’s family. His art was rediscovered in the 1980s with the revival of interest in late-nineteenth-century American expatriate artists.