French still life Henri Fantin-Latour!
Henri Fantin-Latour
French painter and graphic artist. He studied medicine in Paris and at the same time copied the old masters in the Louvre. He studied first with his father, pastel artist, and then at school drawing Horace Lecoq de Buasbodrana. He was a friend of Ingres, Delacroix, Corot .. In 1859, three portraits presented to participate in the Paris Salon, but they were rejected. Subsequently acquainted with Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, became a professional artist. On the walls of the Salon of his paintings appeared in 1863. Then he met the English painter Whistler, who introduced him to English artistic circles, and Fantin-Latour lived for some time in England, many of his portraits and floral arrangements are in English galleries.
Fantin-Latour favored “good works» plot and composition. He did not paint landscapes from nature, and often used in his works literary themes, allegories and musical images of Wagner, Berlioz, Schumann and Brahms. Particularly well known for his portraits, the biggest of them – “In honor of Delacroix” (1864, Louvre). It shows the Baudelaire around Delacroix, Manet, Whistler, Champfleury and Duranty. In the song “Corner Table” (1872, ibid), among others Verlaine and Rimbaud presented.
Among the best works of Fantin-Latour – small works, such as intimate portraits of the artist’s family, portrait of Manet, sketches of flowers. His paintings are distinguished by precision drawing and sophisticated blend of muted and soft gray tones. Almost naturalistic interpretation of the plot in the works of Fantin-Latour suggests that artistic tradition that comes from David and Ingres, under the influence of photography has evolved to a more precise, almost illusionist display the visible world.
In his later years he devoted much attention to lithography, which occupied it since 1862. There are excellent collection of his lithographic work in Dresden, in the British Museum, and in fact a complete set, his widow passed the Louvre. Some of his lithographs were shown at exhibitions in South Kensington in 1898-1899, and in the Dutch gallery in 1904.
In 1876, he married the artist Victoria Duborg, then moved with his family in Bures, a small town in Northern Normandy, where he spent his remaining years.
Fantin-Latour died in Bure 25 August 1904. He was buried in the cemetery of Montparnasse.
