These are not "pale flowers without scent" but living individual blossoms that Fantin painted in this summer bouquet ... The idea of inventing non-existent species or reducing his bouquets to indistinct masses of colour would have been utterly foreign to him. Fantin did not like to paint "an idea of a flower, not be be found in any bouquet," in the words of Mallarmé. Quite the contrary, Fantin individualized his "models," stressing the "inner life" that animates flowers and gives them that "fragile" and "changing beauty" that surpasses their mere ornamental value. Fantin here reflects a common heritage of poetic and popular sayings. It was customary to consider flowers the most "beautiful" and varied wonders in creation, also the most ephemeral, and to ascribe to them votive and affective meaning: flowers made the most fitting gift for friend or lover, the best religious offering. In choosing flowers at the height of their bloom for a bouquet like this one and in arranging them with so much care, Fantin reveals that he shares the pervasive attitudes of his day, as well expressed by the platitudes of daily conversation and the songs of the street as by the writings of authors most careful to avoid such triteness - like Mallarmé or Huysmans, both acquaintances of Fantin. At the turn of the century, the signal value attached to the world of flowers was amplified in the pantheism of Maeterlinck (L'intelligence des fleurs, 1909) just as it lent its forms to art nouveau.
(M. Hoog, in the catalogue for Fantin-Latour, Nov. 1982-Feb. 1983, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, p. 273)

Philippe Brame will include this painting in his forthcoming Fantin-Latour catalogue raisonné.