Henri Fantin-Latour (; 14 January 1836 – 25 August 1904) was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers.
Early life
Born in Grenoble, Isère, Ignace Henri Jean Théodore Fantin-Latour first had drawing lessons with his father Théodore Fantin-Latour (1805-1875), who was a painter. In 1850 he moved to Paris where he enrolled in the small Paris School of Drawing, where he studied with Louis-Alexandre Péron and Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, an innovative and non-traditional instructor who developed his own teaching method based on painting and drawing from memory.
He entered the École des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, in 1854, where he had for classmates, Edgar Degas, Alphonse Legros and Jean-Charles Cazin. After studying there, he spent long time copying the works of the old masters in the Musée du Louvre. Although Fantin-Latour befriended several of the young artists who would later be associated with Impressionism, including Whistler and Manet, his own work remained conservative in style.
In 1861, he briefly frequented the studio of Gustave Courbet. A painting from this period represents him with the painter and caricaturist Oulevay.
At the start of his career, between 1854 and 1861, he produced a large number of self-portraits in chalk, charcoal and oil. He had one of them refused at the Salon of 1859. He participated again with La Liseuse in 1861.
A member of the so-called Cénacle des Batignolles, or group of 1863, from where from Impressionism originated, he was, according to Gustave Kahn, a kind of the link between their painters and romantic painting.
In 1862, one of his still lifes was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. It was the first of a long series, for thereafter he presented several almost every year and which invariably occupied a prominent place in the exhibition building. During his third trip to England, from July to October of 1864, he once again painted still lifes there. He had commercial success.
The 1860s and his still lives
Encouraged by American painter James MacNeill Whistler (1834-1903), whom he met in 1858 at the Louvre, he made several stays in London from 1859 to 1881. In the 1860s, he cultivated the genre of the still life, who would play a capital role in his career. Fantin-Latour would find recognition in England for his compositions of flowers and fruits, at a time when French impressionist painting was still not very widely there. It was said that his still lives were "practically unknown in France during his lifetime". Thanks to Whistler he met his brother-in-law Francis Seymour Haden and the engraver Edwin Edwards, and it was in London that he learned engraving.
His decision to make still lifes may seem surprising at the time of impressionism, however, the choice of such a subject wasn't innocent. In the hierarchy of genres enacted by the Academy of Fine Arts since the 17th century , the still life of fruit or flowers was considered a minor category. By ignoring any literary, religious or historical context, supposed to confer value and nobility on the work, he adopt the opposite stance of academicism. Edwin and Ruth Edwards, his English patrons and merchants, recommended that he always used simple vases and table tops in order to exhibit his great talent in rendering texture and color.
Fantin-Latour still lives were also very appreciated in the Netherlands at his time. At the Living Masters Exhibition in Amsterdam, in 1889, one of his still lives with roses sold by 2,000 guilders, a considerable sum back then. Dutch art dealers from Amsterdam regularly sold works by Fantin-Latour well into the 1930s. Many of these works would end in Dutch museums such as the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, and the Kröller-Müller Museum, in Otterlo.
Artistic universe
After his first Salon submissions were rejected in 1859, he began exhibiting with his friend Édouard Manet and the future Impressionists Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. In 1865, he wrote to Edwin Edwards : “We form a group and make noise because there are many painters and one is easily forgotten. When we come togethe... we grow in numbers and become more adventurous. I thought it could last, it was my mistake”.