Details

Name

Ignace Henri Jean Théodore Fantin-Latour

Brief Biography

1836 - 1904, French

Occupation

Painter

Description

During the final decades of the 19th century Henri Fantin-Latour achieved considerable prominence in France and England as a painter of portraits and still lifes. A traditionalist who championed the cause of the Salon and dismissed the Impressionists as mere ‘dilettantes who produce more noise than art’, he was, nevertheless, friendly with the leading writers and artists of the day, including Baudelaire, Zola, Whistler, Manet, Monet, and Renoir. As the son of a painter, Fantin-Latour began his artistic training early. One of his teachers was Horace Lecoq de Boisboudran, famous for his system of teaching visual memory. In 1854 Fantin-Latour enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris but, dismissed within months, he taught himself by copying from the Old Masters in the Louvre. A friend to many of the Impressionists, he frequented the Café Guerbois in the late 1860s. He denounced their efforts to organize a group show in 1874, however, believing it best to win official recognition at the Paris Salon. Indeed he played a major role in dissuading Manet from exhibiting with them. In his choice of subject-matter and in his use of colour Fantin-Latour remained at some distance from his Impressionist friends. Unlike Monet, Renoir or Pissarro he never liked to work outside directly from nature and even when he, like them, painted flower still lifes, his works were more realistic and much darker and cooler in tone.

Fantin-Latour was fascinated by the relationship between art and music. He enjoyed listening to Berlioz, Brahms, Schumann and Wagner. His devotion to music was such that he even postponed his marriage to Victoria Dubourg so that he could attend the Bayreuth Festival of 1876. Slightly melancholy by nature Fantin once said that work offered the only escape from his black thoughts. In the early 1860s he met Edwin Edwards who, with his wife, was to play an important role as his dealer in Britain. The success of their business can still be seen today in the number of works by Fantin, largely flower pieces, in British public collections.