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This, the first biography in English of Eugène Fromentin, seeks to follow on earlier publications focusing on the literary works, the visual art and the correspondence of the nineteenth-century French painter, novelist, traveller and art critic. It gives an overview of the complex relationship between word and image in his writing and in his painting. In particular, Fromentin's correspondence emerges as the power-house of his creative imagination, the addressee frequently prefiguring the viewer or the reader of the finished work of art, in a blend of inter-disciplinary or inter-textual analogies, which sometimes reveal a surprising generative evolution from letters to literature and beyond.