Henri Fantin-Latour

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 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 1864, he once again painted still lifes there. He had commercial success.

Encouraged by American painter James McNeill 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 lifes 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 adopted 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 lifes were also very appreciated in the Netherlands at his time. At the Living Masters Exhibition in Amsterdam, in 1889, one of his still lifes 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.

After his first Salon submissions were rejected in 1859, Fantin-Latour 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 together... we grow in numbers and become more adventurous. I thought it could last, it was my mistake”. In 1867, he was also one of the nine members of the Japanese Jinglar Society, along with Carolus-Duran, who painted his portrait twice in 1861, and the ceramists Bracquemond and Solon, who they met at dinner in the Japanese style. “One always felt when approaching him, a small feeling of fear, because of these rough manners which the artists of his generation often affected as inseparable from a noble independence,” said Jacques-Émile Blanche, a painter friend of the following generation. Fantin-Latour renovated the collective portraiture with paintings that served as large manifestos: Homage to Delacroix (1864); A Studio at Les Batignolles (1870), a tribute to Manet; The Corner of the Table (1872), a homage to the Parnassian poets, including Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud; and Around the Piano (1885), a tribute to musicians and musicologists of his time. In A Studio at Les Batignolles, Manet is depicted at the center in the act of painting, surrounded by several important painters and writers, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Zacharie Astruc, Emile Zola, Frédéric Bazille and Claude Monet. This canvas testifies to the links he maintained with the artistic and literary avant-garde of the time and to Manet in particular; it also seems to be an echo of Zola's opinion of Manet: "Around the painter reviled by the public, a common front has been created of painters and writers claiming him as a master". In addition to his realistic paintings, Fantin-Latour created imaginative lithographs inspired by the music of some of the great classical composers. In 1876, Fantin-Latour attended a performance of the Ring cycle at Bayreuth, which he found particularly moving. He later published lithographs inspired by Richard Wagner in La revue wagnérienne, which helped solidify his reputation among Paris' avant-garde as an anti-naturalist painter. In 1876, Fantin-Latour married a fellow painter, Victoria Dubourg, whom he met when both were copying the same painting at the Louvre. He spent his summers on the country estate of his wife's family at Buré, Orne in Lower Normandy, where he died on 25 August 1904. Like many painters of his time, he became interested in photography, taking pictures for his work. He was also a big collector of erotic photographs; his estate lists more than 1,400 which are kept in the Museum of Grenoble. He was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris, France.