Through his habit of studying the inner workings of the mind of man, he reached a point, toward the end of his life, when he ceased to compose, even in painting, any works other than those of a man of letters. The keenest intellectual alertness was always ceaselessly pulsating within him. Furthermore, he made a sort of religious cult of life in all its forms, even the most humble, and imbued them with an ennobling charm. And for the purpose of understanding the psychology of a race which enwraps itself jealously in a pride of attitude, the works of Fromentin offer testimony that bears the stamp of rare sincerity and clear-sighted sympathy. His mind never wastes time over the eccentricities of a tribe or a people, but bends its whole effort to gathering up, through a choice of typical details, the general idea, the embodiment of a human group. Fromentin knew, better than anyone else, how great his lack was of elementary training in painting. He knew that no natural gift can replace those initial steps in craftsmanship in any and all forms of production, and that works which are truly beautiful and worthy of being held in honour through the centuries obtain their right to live solely from having obeyed the laws of order and of clearness. These laws, as related to pictorial art, are taught in the studio and the school. A naturally gifted artist may undoubtedly evolve, out of his own personal inspiration, an amusing or interesting work; but that work, if not constructed according to the syntactic rules peculiar to his art, will have merely an ephemeral charm, like the costly baubles of a passing fashion. What proves the necessity of rules of technique is that the masters themselves have not been contented with the possession of genius or talent alone. They have learned their craft down to its profoundest secrets; and the greatest of these masters are the ones who have succeeded best in practising the methods transmitted by past experience, and have even in their turn discovered new laws. How many times, with touching modesty, Fromentin deplored his total lack of the essential studies of apprenticeship! Beneath the colour of forms and objects, he grasped the course and movement of life. But his restless hands did not succeed completely, to his own satisfaction, in transferring them to his canvas. Nevertheless, his pictures, because imbued with an emotion, the contagion of which was communicated to their colours, far from resembling, as so many others do, a sort of clever and inert photograph, are evocations, and often magnificent ones, of some historic hour, of the destiny of a race, or the soul of a landscape.