Standard Bearer

In American salerooms this picture went by other names. When Thomas Robinson, a collector who divided his life between Paris and Providence, Rhode Island, sold it in New York in 1886, it was catalogued as Arab Staff Officer Calling to the Fight. Three years later, at another New York auction, it was simply The Charge. The museum calls it Standard Bearer. All three describe the same scene. A horseman in a white cloak and a red robe gallops across stony desert on a dappled grey, holding up a banner striped red, yellow and green, while far behind him a line of riders crosses the plain. Fromentin painted it in Paris in the first half of the 1860s, years after his journeys in Algeria, working from memory and sketches with a loose, quick brush. Collectors in New England wanted such scenes. The canvas went through the hands of Vose Galleries, the Providence and Boston dealers, twice, and in 1907 it was bought by Robert Dawson Evans, a Boston rubber manufacturer, and his wife Maria Antoinette. A year later Evans lent it to an exhibition of French painters of the generation of 1830, held by the Copley Society in Boston. His widow left it to the museum in 1917.