Works by Henri Fantin-Latour

Henri Fantin-Latour painted flowers and fruit on simple table tops, pictures that found a ready market in England, and drew dreamlike lithographs inspired by music.

His first drawing lessons came from his father, a painter. He went on to Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who taught painting and drawing from memory, and spent long stretches copying old masters at the Louvre. From 1854 to 1861 he portrayed himself again and again, in oil, charcoal and chalk. In the seated self-portrait of 1861 the face and the palette catch the light while the black coat sinks into a red-brown ground.

Encouraged by Whistler, whom he met at the Louvre in 1858, he made several stays in London, and from 1862 the Royal Academy showed his still lifes almost every year. His English patrons, Edwin and Ruth Edwards, advised plain vases and tabletops. In Pansies, of 1874, clay pots and a wicker basket of yellow, purple and white pansies stand on a grey-brown table against a grey wall.

Music fed his imaginative work: after hearing Wagner's Ring at Bayreuth in 1876 he published lithographs inspired by Wagner in La revue wagnérienne. The Anniversary, an 1877 homage to Berlioz in pastel over a lithograph, gathers grieving figures, a winged figure and a woman holding a scroll around a monument lettered BERLIOZ. Nearly a third of the works below are prints; in late lithographs such as Venus Anadyomene, 1898, the nude goddess stands in soft, grainy greys with putti crowding around her.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, Kunsthaus Zürich.