Painter; founder of the modern practice of art criticism and art historian who helped reassert the primacy of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch/Belgian masters. Fromentin's father, Toussaint Fromentin-Dupeux (d. 1867), was a doctor and amateur painter (trained under Jean-Victor Bertin), and his mother, Jenny Billotte Fromentin-Dupeux, the daughter of a Naval administrator and regional councillor in La Rochelle.