Roses et capucines

The freshness and variety in Henri Fantin-Latour's floral still lifes attest to the artist's mastery of this genre. He follows in the footsteps of the best of French still-life painters, and the beauty and brilliance of his works rival those of the Dutch painters so renowned for their advances and achievements in the depiction of flowers. According to Pierre Courthion, "Not since the great Flemish masters has any artist been more capable of endowing flower painting with so much brilliance, so many shadings and so vivid a use of color than Fantin-Latour (P. Courthion, "Fantin-Latour, Painter of Flowers" in Henri Fantin-Latour, exh. cat., Acquavella Galleries, Inc., New York, 1966).
The extraordinary quality of Fantin-Latour's images derives, in part, from the artist's personal connection to his subject matter. He gathered many of his flowers from the garden of his house in Buri, France. In the present work, the combination of roses and nasturtium makes a splendid bouquet. Roses et capucines is remarkable in the meticulous quality of the brushwork, the brilliant character of the light, and the dynamism within the arrangement.
In many ways, the rose is the supreme test of a flower painter’s skill. To paint the rose at its best, the artist must impart a convincing sense of roundness and weight to the densely layered blossoms of the most complex varieties—the tea rose, noisette, and hybrid perpetuals—while at the same time suggesting the lightness and delicacy of the individual petals. Fantin's decision to dedicate more of his time to still life painting was substantially motivated by a desire to hone his considerable powers of observation; moreover, he combined this remarkable acuity of vision with an exquisite sense of color and a distinct eye for composition.