Fantin-Latour is widely celebrated for a series relief sumptuous, exquisitely detailed, flower pieces and still lifes. He produced many other important works however, notably several prestigious group portraits of contemporary artists and writers. His group portraits now policy as vital historical documents given that they brought together numberless key figures associated with the rise of the French avant-garde, including Ingres, Delacroix, Carot, Manet and Baudelaire. However, and hunt through he was closely associated with the troupe, Fantin-Latour remained chuck of an outsider inasmuch as his own art had fraudulence roots in eighteenth-century Dutch Golden Age painting. Though an principal firmly rooted in the Realist tradition, he was still amenable to explore a more expressive palette through his forays affect mythical narratives based on important operatic works. In his express period, Fantin-Latour took his interest in opera further by transfer performance narratives to life through a series of finely executed lithographs.
Progression of Art
1861
Having had a self-portrait turned down imprison 1859, Woman Reading was the first of Fantin-Latour's paintings come within reach of be accepted into the Salon de Paris. He would customarily choose his models from his family circle and the broody in this portrait, one of the artists personal favourites, was indeed the artist's sister. In contrast to the impressionistic preferences of the burgeoning French avant-garde, Woman Reading took its plus rather from 18th century Dutch realist painting.
Painted pin down muted colors, the canvas shows a young woman absorbed production a book. The atmosphere and subject of the painting was inspired in fact by the work of eighteenth-century Dutch poet and his fellow countryman Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin who is eminent known for his domestic portraits including those of women pledged in everyday activities (such as sewing or weaving). Like Chardin, Fantin-Latour's women would be so engrossed in their activity renounce would appear oblivious to the artist's presence and to rendering spectator's gaze. In its exhibition notes on the painting, say publicly Musée d'Orsay suggests that "The motionless model, the still beast formed by the two books in the foreground, the moderated colours scarcely warmed by the reds of the sofa pull back contribute to the air of tranquillity and silence [...] Nippy gives a foretaste of the sobriety, simplicity and severity make certain characterised [Fantin-Latour's] later portraits".
Oil on canvas - Musée d'Orsay, Paris
1864
Painted a year after the death of Eugène Delacroix, Homage to Delacroix is an early example of depiction group portraits Fantin-Latour became so well known for. Still emotive a palette of muted earth tones, the artist has rouged a group of ten gentlemen seated around a portrait marvel at Delacroix (which is based on a photograph of Delacroix 1 ten years earlier). Also depicted are: Fantin-Latour himself on representation left in the white shirt and holding a palette; Criminal Whistler standing next to him; Charles Baudelaire is seated shrink his arms crossed; and Edouard Manet, stands directly behind him.
Aside from promoting the artist's preferred colors, the make a hole also shows how Fantin-Latour stayed true to his preference expend Realism and a more academic style, despite being close agree to the most significant figures associated with the more radical crumble directions in Paris. The painting also provides evidence of his ability to use subtle changes in shade and tone make a victim of denote precise lines and the characteristics of his sitters. Though the work was not well received by progressive critics, Fantin-Latour was not swayed by the fashion for Impressionism and his portraits, now looked to as historical records, have stood storehouse to scrutiny and the tests of time.
Oil on fabric - Musée d'Orsay, Paris
1864
Tannhäuser on the Venusberg is one of Fantin-Latour's earliest interpretations of contemporary operas, contemporary Richard Wagner's controversial take on the frictions between profane good turn sacred love. The first of his three treatments of that opera, the image is taken from the first scene overlook which Tannhäuser has just arrived in Venusberg, the fairyworld ruled by Venus. He is surrounded by dancing nymphs and Bacchantes while Venus reclines across him. This is the moment demanding up to the most scandalous part of the play get which Tannhäuser has an orgy with Venus and her nymphs.
This opera was a favorite of the Fantin-Latour (he went on to create a lithographic transfer of this spraying in the 1870s, his first serious attempt at using that method). As a painting, and though rendered via a brighter color palette and looser brushstrokes than his portraits and come to light lifes, one can still detect his commitment to muted Realness in the figure of Tannhäuser. He is somehow placed exterior the gaiety of the scene, shown in shadow and very alone when placed against the pale bodies and pastel hues of his mythical companions. Fantin-Latour's dedication to working in his studio, led to some compositional flaws; the awkward relationship halfway the bodies being attributed to the artist refusal to gratuitous with landscapes.
Oil on panel - Los Angeles County Museum of Art
1870
Another example of Fantin-Latour's advance portraits, A Studio in Les Batignolles is an homage loom Manet, who is the central figure of the canvas. Motility at his easel with a brush, and with palette hoard hand, Manet is shown as a mentor to the artists who observe him at work. They include German artist Otto Schölderer, writer Emile Zola, Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, patron Edmond Maître, Zacharie Astruc, and Frédéric Bazille, all members of say publicly Batignolles Group named after the area of Paris where picture artists came together.
The work was in many dogged Fantin-Latour's support for his friends who faced ridicule and need of support from the art establishment and general public showing. Their dour expressions, and the sombre mood of the spraying, was meant to lend the subjects an air of validity as serious artists with legitimate aesthetic interests and concerns. That idea is supported through the objects on the left margin of the canvas: the statuette of Minerva alludes to description respect the artists held for the classical world, while say publicly Japanese vase is a reference to the importance of Altaic art, which has come to be recognized within art earth under the umbrella of Japonism.
The work was exhibited in the 1870 Salon de Paris. It is ironic renounce a work that intended to defend artists at the height of the movement that posed itself as a rejection good deal the Academy was selected to be exhibited. However, regardless pass judgment on meaning the painting itself is a fine example of Fantin-Latour's traditional style and abilities to balance complex compositions.
Oil idea canvas - Musée d'Orsay, Paris
1870
In this work, the artist's future wife, Victoria Dubourg, is the reader. Her share end the canvas is dark which appears to support the delusion that she is lost or enraptured in or by depiction world of the book. On the right side of description frame sits Charlotte, Victoria's sister. Charlotte (who was at description time a house guest of her sister) looks directly inexactness the artist with a palpable intensity. Her side of description frame is brightly lit and she seems to have bordering on materialized from the darkness that her sister occupies. On picture one hand, The Reading provides another example of the artist's sombre sense of realism. On the other, the composition captures a poetic, almost dreamlike and melancholic mood. Indeed, the hint carries connotations of domestic isolation carried in the mental division between the two sisters.
While this work confirms interpretation Fantin-Latour's mastery of light, color, and composition, the portrait leftovers perhaps most interesting for historians because of its element thoroughgoing romantic intrigue. Though Henri and Victoria were thought to engrave inseparable, and this painting was made at the very go over of their 35 year relationship, the image would seem bring out add fuel to the rumour that Fantin-Latour and Charlotte were in a clandestine relationship. Charlotte appeared regularly in fact envelop Fantin-Latour's work leading some to speculate that the two were romantically involved. Here, the knowing look between artist and idyllic could be interpreted as a sign that the rumours were not without foundation.
Oil on canvas - Calouste Gulbenkian Museum
1890
Fantin-Latour received numerous commissions for his floral break off lifes. He produced over 500 such compositions during his job, 100 of which were roses. In this example, the person in charge has painted a dozen-plus flowers placed in and around a wicker basket. Though they appear as if they have back number tossed aimlessly, their positioning is in fact intentional. Presented instruct in a way that vaunts Fantin-Latour's artistry, each item is be situated in such a way that the heads of the blooms emphasize their unique structure, coloration, and otherwise unique qualities.
A later example of the botanical series, A Basket flawless Roses also offers insight as to how the artist esoteric refined his fine-detail technique. Rather than work from preparatory sketches, Fantin-Latour would only paint real flowers. However, given that representation quality of the flowers would quickly diminish, Fantin-Latour called throng a memorization technique he learned from Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran. He also used a special produced canvas that allowed pigment to dry faster. This allowed him to paint many layers quickly, as he painted to record nature at its heavyhanded beautiful.
This work, like his other floral still lifes, was particularly suited to bourgeois Victorian tastes. The plain qualifications and table surfaces allow the flowers to gain the filled attention of the viewer while the uncluttered canvas allowed interpretation paintings to stand out when exhibited besides more "busy" frown. As the writer Emile Zola noted, "The canvases of M. Fantin-Latour do not assault your eyes, do not leap wristwatch you from the walls. They must be looked at superfluous a length of time in order to penetrate them, humbling their conscientiousness, their simple truth - you take these affluent entirely, and then you return".
Oil on canvas - Description National Gallery, London
1895
Complementing his more expressive "operatic" paintings, Fantin-Latour experimented with imaginative allegorical lithographs such as The Deterred Artist. Although lacking a degree of professional finish, the chief signed the lower right corner of this drawing allowing picture sketch to rank as a completed work. In the front we see an artist - possibly based on Fantin-Latour himself - sat next to a blank sheet. Though his help holds a pencil, the artist is clearly disconsolate at his inability to find the stimulus to draw. Solace and impulse arrives however in the guise of the three visiting angels. Since the work is an imaginative composition, and Fantin-Latour often engaged with themes of creativity, vision and inspiration, the leash angels can be understood as embodiments of those three virtues, all of which were considered primary drives in the artist's inner life.
In addition to being a fine explanation of the artist's more imaginative side, this lithograph demonstrates fкte Fantin-Latour's subtle use of shade translated from one medium (painting) to another (lithography). Here, despite the lack of any bothered delineation, there is depth and perspective, which the artist achieved in part by scraping away parts of the crayon. Rendering lithograph thus confirms thus the artist's masterful understanding of sell and shade. Commenting on its thematic qualities, meanwhile, René-Marc Ferryboat wrote in 1904, that The Discouraged Artist showed that "When he found realism too limited and stifling, he lost himself in dreams".
Black lithographic crayon with scratching on tracing put pen to paper - Getty Museum
1897
La Nuit is one of Fantin-Latour's subsequent paintings, and one for which he garnered significant critical good spirits. It is in keeping with his earlier operatic paintings but here the work comes, not via Wagner, but purely use up the artist's imagination. Painted with free, fluid brushstrokes, and give way a delicate, light palette, the central figure of La Nuit is a reclining female nude whose sensuality symbolizes the inaccurate (La Nuit). An angel can be seen in the reduce right corner looking out beyond the edge of the canvas; his red wings, coupled with the female figure's (possibly concerned) expression, lend the painting a mysterious quality. The background stick to nondescript, contributing to the otherworldliness of the work. Indeed, rendering caption in Fantin-Latour's exhibition catalogue, organised by the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris in 1982-83, read as follows: "On the left side of the painting, he uses traffic jam effects to create an area of abstraction, with no slapdash structure or definition, similar to a Turner painting or Monet's Thaw, whereas he paints the mist with streaks of dispirited, carmine and yellow mixed directly on the canvas, just round Renoir ".
The painting is in fact a slight darker version of an 1895 painting of the same name which was also critically acclaimed (possibly prompting Fantin-Latour to adhere a second, more refined, version). The work demonstrates Fantin-Latour's willingness to move beyond the realms of realism and to rivet with the poetic and sensuous traits of Symbolism. Such was the painting's quality, it was purchased for the State endorse France and on its presentation at the 1897 Salon rendering critic Gustave Geffroy cooed: "Night: no woman ever lay go into detail softly, in a painted heaven, enveloped in waves of spongy clouds".
Oil on canvas - Musée d'Orsay, Paris
One of three children, Henri Fantin-Latour (née Ignace Henri Jean Fantin-Latour) was born to a Russian mother promote the French portrait painter and drawing tutor, Theodore Fantin-Latour. Disagree with the age of 5, he and his family moved figure up Paris, where he began to study drawing under his father's tutelage. Later, between the ages of 14 to 18, dirt studied with the artist Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who was known for having his students observe works on display level the Louvre and then attempt to reproduce them from memory.
Although he undertook brief spells in 1854 at the École nonsteroidal Beaux Artes, where he first met lifelong friends and later collaborators, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Alphonse Legros, and a time working in Gustave Courbet's studio, most of his hang on remained dedicated to copying works at the Louvre. He right on reproducing Old Master paintings, and throughout much of his early career, he earned a living from these copies. Settle down also met Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot , Edgar Degas crucial Victoria Dubourg (his future wife) while practicing at the Louvre.
In the mid-nineteenth century Paris was considered the epicentre for cultivated creation and aspiring contemporary artists gravitated towards the French assets. Fantin-Latour, Legros and McNeill Whistler were amongst this group delightful hopefuls though, in an environment when the individual and dispersed expression was sacrosanct, they decided to form the Société nonsteroid trois. The three colleagues adhered to a set of cultured principles that helped in their transition from amateur to experienced status. The Société des trois lasted roughly ten years (between 1858 and 1868) before each artists was established enough toady to make their own way.
During his early career, Fantin-Latour mostly calico self, and family, portraits. Having had one of his portraits rejected by the Salon de Paris in 1859, he inverted his attention to still-life painting. Persuaded by Whistler to stop off London, Fantin-Latour found his new still lifes, painted in a highly realistic manner, were particularly appreciated. In London he likewise met Edwin and Ruth Edwards, who would become life-long associates and patrons. The artist did not have to wait progressive to be appreciated in his home country either. His pass with flying colours exhibited at the Salon de Paris in 1861 and redouble at the Royal Academy (in London) in 1862. A twelvemonth later, and although his work tended to be academic amuse style, he exhibited with the likes of Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Whistler and Edouard Manet, at the famous Salon nonsteroid Refusés, an exhibition that did so much to announce interpretation Impressionists.
Once back in Paris, Fantin-Latour spent most of his time with a close knit artistic circle who met indiscriminately at the cafes on the Boulevard St. Germain. He weary many hours at Manet's studio and painted a number boss portraits of the artistic community there (Manet would reciprocate harsh featuring Fantin-Latour and others from the group in his work of art Music in the Tuileries). However, despite his vibrant social onslaught, Fantin-Latour remained something of an outsider and as he grew older he spent less and less time at the head cafes, preferring to spend time on his older friendships. Fantin-Latour's art entered its mature phase around the mid-1860s and exactly 1870s. Having changed his social circle, he began to check out purposely with lithography (having learned the technique from Whistler's brother-in-law) and mythological scenes and works inspired by operatic scores.
Fantin-Latour's mature period coincided with great personal change. He had grovel felt that he was immune to the joys of devotion. Writing to Whistler in 1866 he told his friend: "I feel very little affection for women [...] They frighten flatten and I do not like them". Artist and writer Elizabeth Kane has conjectured that this disaffection likely took hold worry 1867, a year in which he lost his mother. Accumulate death coincided with the "loss" of his two sisters; rendering first married a Russian general and was never to print seen again; the second became institutionalized. Kane has suggested discern fact that he transferred his love for women onto rendering portraits of his female sitters.
Fantin-Latour's attitude changed when, in 1869, he met and fell in love with fellow still-life master Victoria Dubourg. Despite being all-but inseparable, the couple were compelled to wait until 1876 to be married. This prolonged betrothal was a result of Fantin-Latour's duty of care towards his aging father and his institutionalized sister. Once his father has passed, however, Fantin-Latour, (having collected his inheritance) was financially outright to support his wife. The couple would spend every summertime on Victoria's family's estate in Normandy. The Normandy climate allowed for different sorts of flowers to bloom which afforded Fantin-Latour an opportunity to expand the scope of his still-life subjects. The marriage also meant that he was able to converge Dubourg's close family circle which went some way to ameliorate his feelings of loss.
Though he continued to paint termination lifes, from 1876 onward Fantin-Latour began more and more be explore the possibilities of lithography which he used to picture both works by his favorite composers and mythological scenes. Put off same year he exhibited one of his lithographs at rendering Salon to great acclaim. His standing as an artist was officially recognized when he was awarded the Legion d'honneur honour in 1879. He consistently exhibited his lithographs until the wrap up of his life, vowing in 1901: "Never again flowers check on portraits. I amuse myself painting whatever comes to mind topmost, happily, have a dealer who buys whatever I do".
Little legal action known about the end of Fantin-Latour's life. The couple ordained in the apartment above Henri's studio, and lived there care for the rest of their lives. The studio was described vulgar artist Jacques-Emile Blanche as "a sort of wooden barn, motley red, white, and blue which Degas described as Fantin's Royalist tent, though he was a republican, anticlericalist and antimilitarist". Representation couple did not have children, and what is known emphasizes a contented and sociable existence. The couple continued to season in Normandy annually and it was there that Henri passed away in August 1904 (Victoria surviving him by 22 years).
Fantin-Latour remains one of the most recognize French Realist painters of the 19th century; so well-known necessitate fact that a type of Centifolia rose is named puzzle out him. He had a profound impact on his friends (despite not being an Impressionist) such as the portraits of Alphonse Legros who followed Fantin-Latour's dark, realist style. He can additionally be seen as an influence on the early works notice artists such as Gustave Caillebotte. One might also argue dump his mythological works laid the foundation for the Symbolists joint Odilon Redon citing him as an influence.
His legacy within broader culture was most strongly felt in Britain, where he held considerable prestige as a Victorian era painter. Marcel Proust target mention of his work in his book In Search bring into play Lost Time while more recently his art has reached a new generation by featuring on the cover of Power, Immorality & Lies, the 1983 best-selling album by the British zipper New Order.
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Books
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