Henri Fantin-Latour: Still Life with Flowers and Fruit

Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, Henri Fantin-Latour, 1866, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Paris, 1866. Henri Fantin-Latour carefully arranges golden pears, scarlet apples, and flowering branches. The painter composes a visual symphony for his London patron, Michael Spartali. On this brown table, each element finds its place in perfect balance.

A Living Still Life

Observe this woven wicker basket overflowing with luminous fruit. The golden-yellow pears catch the light, their matte skin contrasting with the gleaming apples. In the background, an elegant black vase holds a generous bouquet: pink and white lilacs, wallflowers with delicate petals. Each brushstroke builds the volume of the fruit, the rough texture of the basket, the velvety quality of the petals. The neutral tones of the background—that soothing blue-gray—enhance the brilliance of the subjects.

Chardin’s Heir

This work belongs to a series of four still lifes commissioned by Spartali, a Greek diplomat. Fantin-Latour worked on them from March to September 1866 and exhibited one at the Paris Salon. The painter follows in the lineage of the great masters: he admired Chardin for his elegant simplicity and Courbet for his uncompromising realism. In Second Empire France, still life was experiencing a revival. Fantin-Latour transformed this genre, considered minor, into ambitious and contemplative compositions.

Henri Fantin-Latour, the Artist of Intimacy

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) excelled in group portraits and still lifes. Trained in Paris, he developed a realistic and delicate style. This canvas marks his first major successes in the genre.

Think about it

💭 By choosing to elevate still life to the rank of a major work, wasn’t Fantin-Latour challenging the academic hierarchy of genres that still dominated nineteenth-century art?