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Charles Henry Fromuth was born on the 23rd of February, 1859, the oldest of nine children, to parents who had immigrated to the United States from Germany. His father Caspar, after exploring for gold in California married Christiana Freund and together they settled in Philadelphia. Caspar worked as a weaver in a carpet factory and made their home in a row house in the 19th Ward. Charles, by his own description had a melancholic childhood deprived of aesthetic stimulus. At age fifteen, after seven years of school Fromuth got a job in a carpet factory as a card stamper. He had been drawing from the age of nine and felt his artistic bent would lead to a position designing carpets. His formal instruction as an artist came with his enrollment at the Philadelphia School of Fine Arts under the direction of Thomas Eakins ; he discovered Europe and Paris in 1889 and came for the first time to Concarneau and Pont-Aven in 1890. With the exception of a trip to the United States in 1910, he stayed the rest of his life in Concarneau, boarding at the Hôtel de France in this sardine port.

During the Universal Exhibition of 1900, he discovered Japanese art and in particular Hokusai. Fromuth has the same outlook on nature as the Japanese, he has the cult of the sea which is never a decoration but an essential subject, studied in all its forms. All his work is mainly devoted to the animation of boats in the port of Concarneau. “Movement is the central idea of ​​my work,” wrote Charles Fromuth. He exhibited regularly in Europe, obtaining various prizes and medals, until 1910. After this date, he no longer exhibits and leads a hermit life entirely devoted to his pastels and charcoals representing boats fleeing under sail. Fromuth never married. He died in 1937 (May 26) at a retirement home in Concarneau. He is buried in the Concarneau cemetery.

The Pont-Aven Museum of Fine Arts devoted an exhibition to him in 1989 [ 2 ] .Bold text