Henri Fantin-Latour: The Complete Story
Henri Fantin-Latour was the painter the French avant garde chose for its group portraits, and the flower painter England could not get enough of. Born in Grenoble in 1836, he stood beside Manet and the Impressionists, and never once painted like them.
He documented a revolution while declining to join it. Here is the quietest man in the loudest room of the 1860s.
Fantin-Latour at a glance:
Born in Grenoble in 1836; a Louvre copyist by trade and temperament.
Painted the group portraits that documented his avant-garde friends.
His flower paintings funded everything, adored by English collectors.
Never joined the Impressionist exhibitions despite knowing everyone.
Died in 1904, leaving music-obsessed lithographs and 800 flower pieces.
The copyist of the Louvre
Fantin trained by copying in the Louvre, day after day for years, and met everyone there: Manet, Whistler, Berthe Morisot.
Whistler took his flower pictures to London in 1859, and English collectors, led by the Edwards family, bought them steadily for the rest of his life.
For decades the French knew Fantin mainly as a name on the back of pictures leaving for England.
The group portraits that wrote history
Three canvases made him the recording secretary of modern art. Hommage a Delacroix in 1864 gathered the young rebels, Manet, Whistler, Baudelaire, around the dead master's portrait.
A Studio at Les Batignolles in 1870 shows Manet painting while Monet, Renoir, Bazille and Zola stand witness; it hangs in the Orsay like a founding document.
And Un coin de table in 1872 seated the poets, including a 17 year old Arthur Rimbaud beside Verlaine.
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The myth: just a flower painter
Because he painted hundreds of rose pieces for the English market, Fantin gets shelved with the decorators.
The record is stranger: the flower painter refused every invitation to show with the Impressionists, kept faith with the Salon, and meanwhile made lithographs of pure fantasy, swirling homages to Wagner and Berlioz that the Symbolists claimed as their own.
He was two painters, and both were out of step on purpose.
Victoria Dubourg, and the double studio
In 1876 he married the still life painter Victoria Dubourg, whom he had met copying in the Louvre.
Two flower painters shared one house; her career slowed as his ledger grew, and after his death in 1904 she spent years building the record of his work, publishing the full catalogue in 1911.
The name on that volume is Madame Fantin-Latour.
Where to see Fantin-Latour
The Musee d'Orsay holds the great group portraits; the Louvre his self portraits. The flower pieces are everywhere his buyers were: the National Gallery in London, the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, and American museums from Washington to Boston.
The group portraits as history
A Studio at Les Batignolles of 1870 seats Manet at the easel with Monet, Renoir, Bazille, and Zola around him, painted with notarial calm.
His group portraits are the census of the avant-garde he refused to join: he documented the revolution while declining to enlist.
Flowers for London
Through his friend Whistler and the dealer Edwards, his roses and peonies sold to England by the crate, hundreds over four decades.
They paid the bills and became a genre of their own, admired by Proust and later by painters who envied their unforced perfection.
The Wagner dreams
His private passion was music: lithographs of Wagner, Berlioz, and Schumann scenes, mists and muses far from his sober portraits.
The prints, over a hundred, are the id of a careful man, and the Impressionists' documentarian ended as France's great musical dreamer on stone.
The Henri Fantin-Latour questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? Flower still lifes and the group portraits of Manet's and Verlaine's circles.
Was he an Impressionist? No. He knew them all, painted them together, and refused to exhibit with them.
Who bought his flowers? English collectors above all, through Whistler and the Edwards family from 1859 on.
Who was his wife? Victoria Dubourg, a still life painter, who compiled his catalogue after his death in 1904.
Who is in A Studio at Les Batignolles? Manet at the easel, with Monet, Renoir, Bazille, Zola, and others gathered, painted by Fantin-Latour in 1870 as the group's formal portrait. It hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.
Why so many flower paintings? English collectors bought them steadily from the 1860s, and he painted about 800: the income that let him stay independent of movements and juries.
More secrets to unlock
One last fact
Un coin de table nearly looked different: the poet Albert Merat refused to be painted beside Verlaine and Rimbaud, whose scandal was already public. Fantin replaced him with a pot of hortensias.
The vase of flowers standing in for an offended poet is the most Fantin-Latour solution in art history, and the picture is now the only major painted portrait of Rimbaud.
