Eugene Fromentin (1820-76) was born into a prosperous middle-class family in La Rochelle. He had achieved some success as a painter when in 1875 he was invited to write articles on Dutch painting for a journal. He made a trip to Flanders and Holland, and this is his account of that journey. For him the great masters of the past were the early Flemish masters and Rubens, Frans Hals, Rembrandt and the Dutch and genre painters. He visited churches, museums and private collections to study their works, and jotted down his personal impressions on the spot.