He was especially appreciative of Marilhat and Decamps; the absolutely new brilliance of their works haunted him constantly, in the midst of his own labours. “That talented pair, Marilhat and Decamps, so Théophile Gautier writes me, are oddly close neighbours, yet they do not trespass on each other’s ground; where the one has the advantage in fantasy, the other offsets it in character.” Reinstalled in Paris, Fromentin painted with desperate zeal, lacking the gift, so he said, of inventing what he had not seen. He forced himself to escape from that spirit of imitation which is at once a pleasure and a danger, and up to the present he had accomplished nothing save to rid himself of those borrowed qualities which he had acquired, without succeeding in gaining others which he could call his own. He had, however, learned--and this knowledge is an essential virtue of every artist--that the real masters have never attempted to reproduce any object actually, but only the spirit which animates it to the point of rendering it a treasury of life and of beauty; he learned, day by day, more thoroughly, that poetry is everywhere, like the spark in the flint; that the artist must study technique from the masters and truth from nature, but that he can find nowhere, except within himself, the innate image of beauty. In 1847, he sent to the Salon, which at that time was held in the Louvre, three little pictures, which were unanimously accepted: _A Farm in the Outskirts of La Rochelle, A Mosque near Algiers, The Gorges of Chiffa_. “The first of the pictures,” says M. Gonse, “is characteristic of Fromentin’s earliest manner. Looked at only from the surface, it is heavy and pasty. It was a timid work, but in nowise silly or vulgar. _The Gorges of Chiffa_ forms the curtain-raiser to Fromentin’s Algeria.” But Fromentin was exercising more and more his power of self-analysis; he knew that his paintings were nothing more than a certain equilibrium of secondary qualities, approximately correct in design and agreeable in colour, but destitute of motive power. He had also learned the cause of alteration in certain tones; the colours which he had been employing were not susceptible of combination. “He had learned that mineral blue and indian yellow, combined with white, especially with white of lead, turned black and produced a leaden tone ... also that paint was less enduring on white canvas than on canvas already prepared with a ground colour.” [Illustration: PLATE IV.--THE SIROCCO IN THE OASIS (Musée du Louvre) Fromentin was not only a past-master of colour. The _Sirocco_ proves, by the prodigious cataclysm that it represents, how supple and varied was this painter’s talent. And one must marvel at such evidence of power in the author of so many works of exquisite and lyric charm.]