092

  • Floral Still Life

  • n.d.
  • Ignace-Henri-Jean-Théodore Fantin-Latour (French 1836-1904)
  • Oil on canvas
  • 51.5 x 40.8 cm., 20-1/4 x 16"
  • Lent Courtesy of Private Collection in Memory of Dr. Thomas William Carter through Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts

Essay by Margaret Rogal, Former Reference Librarian and Assistant Professor

Perhaps the most formative influence in the development of Henri Fantin-Latour was the training he received not in an art school but in the Louvre where as a young artist he spent eighteen years copying the masters (Druick and Hoog 12). Here, Fantin observed, honed his technique, and steeped himself in the great tradition of art. In the halls of the Louvre, too, Fantin met fellow artists who were to shape his career, especially James McNeill Whistler (web gallery 76, 85, 103, 115 and 125) who more than anyone else was instrumental in promoting Fantin as a painter of still life.

Born in 1836 in Grenoble, the only child of an artist, Fantin learned early to draw and paint under his father's tutelage and later to paint from memory. Although well known as a painter of portraits and fantasies, subjects Fantin hoped would earn him lasting respect, it was as a painter of still life, especially flowers, that Fantin earned a reputation and a living, especially in England where Whistler introduced him to Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Edwards who for three decades successfully marketed his still life paintings to an eager English market.

Although acquainted with the Impressionists, Fantin didn't like to work in "the sun and the shade" (Lucie-Smith 22) outdoors, preferring to arrange a bouquet of flowers from his wife's cottage garden in Buré and paint it in the studio. His rendering of chrysanthemums in the painting here reveals his typical muted background (Poulet and Murphy 73), his attentiveness to the lush and elegant flower shapes, and his delight in a restrained reflection of light on glass and leaf, creating a charming effect of "hushed silence" (Bailey and Rishel 29).

Throughout his life, Fantin was ambivalent about still life, at times reveling in it as a "marvellous thing" (Druick and Hoog 113), and at others, distrusting its popularity, marketability, and repetitiveness—"Never have I had more ideas about art in my head, and yet I am forced to do flowers. While painting them—standing before the peonies and roses—I think of Michelangelo. This cannot go on" (Druick and Hoog 113). Yet, even when he didn't have to, "the visual poet of flowers" (Druick and Hoog 114) went on painting them for the rest of his life.