Henri-Théodore Fantin-Latour (French, 1836–1904)
Still Life with Vase of Hawthorn, Bowl of Cherries, Japanese Bowl, and Cup and Saucer, 1872
Oil on canvas
Foundation for the Arts Collection, Mrs. John B. O'Hara Fund and gift of Mrs. Bruno Graf by exchange, 2001.5.FA

Of the three kinds of subjects (portraiture, still-life, and the so-called imaginative subjects) to which Fantin-Latour devoted his career, still life is the one for which he has always been most celebrated. This superb painting is typical of the artist’s most refined work in the genre, balancing an array of still-life objects—a glass vase filled with blossoming stems of hawthorn, a crystal dish abundant with cherries, and a blue-and-white Japanese ceramic bowl—against a delicately scumbled, silvery background. Fantin’s commitment to still life was inspired by the mid-19th-century avant-garde doctrine of the necessity of direct observation of nature in painting. As it had for Eugène Delacroix before him, and for his close friend Edouard Manet, a vase of flowers or a basket of fruit provided Fantin with an endless variety of compositional possibilities for his rigorous explorations of form and color.

Fantin-Latour occupies a seminal place in the complex history of avant-garde painting in Paris in the second half of the 19th century. An admirer of Gustave Courbet, and a devoted friend to Manet and James Whistler, Fantin is often associated with the earliest formation of the group of young artists who would form the nucleus of the impressionists. Fantin’s artistic identification with the ambitions of the new painting is most famously documented in his homage to Manet, A Studio in the Batignolles, painted in 1870 (now in the Musée d’Orsay). In this painted manifesto of modern painting, Fantin has portrayed Otto Scholderer, Auguste Renoir, Emile Zola, Edmond Maître, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet, gathered around their mentor Manet, who is at work on a portrait of the critic Zacharie Astruc, seated at the center of this invented composition. Although Fantin participated in the culture of the Parisian avant-garde at nearly every level, and shared many of the same critical supporters and patrons of those artists who participated in the impressionist exhibitions, he never fully embraced any single artistic credo. Although an admirer of Courbet’s realism, Fantin disdained the older painter’s investment in a political art. Fantin never shared the impressionist preoccupation with the urban landscape and painting out-of-doors, preferring the controlled environment of the studio. A lover of modern music, Fantin’s mature figural work takes up subjects inspired by the music of Wagner and Berlioz, thereby linking him to the fantastical realm of fin-de-siècle symbolism. Like Degas’s oeuvre, Fantin’s art is idiosyncratic, and at times, radically singular, reflecting an individual synthesis of the many currents of avant-garde production in Europe.

Like Manet and Cézanne, Fantin was influenced by the revival of critical attention given to the French 18th-century painter Chardin, whose still-life paintings seemed to embody the value of formal considerations, divorced from literary content. Fantin’s 19th-century emulation of the painterly virtues associated with Chardin is evident in the delight he takes in conducting the formal rhythms of this still-life painting. The scalloped shape of the crystal dish and ceramic bowl are repeated throughout the composition. Like Cézanne, Fantin faithfully records the perceptual conundrum posed by the flower stems as distorted by the water in the glass vase, thereby challenging the entanglement of what we see and what we cognitively assume to be. The intricate delicacy of Fantin’s trademark technique is evident in the nuanced touch of the artist. For example, the blue-and-white bowl bears the trace of the artist’s fingerprints, visible to the naked eye in raking light.