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Lot Essay
This painting will be included in the catalogue raisonn of Fantin-Latour's paintings and pastels by Galerie Brame & Lorenceau now in preparation.
During the 1860s, still life painting became more and more important to Fantin-Latour, partly due to the measure of financial success it provided, but also because it was a means to understand the achievement of great masters of the past, like Velasquez and Rembrandt whom he greatly admired and had copied in the Louvre.
"Fantin's flower pieces have a special quality, which is well summed up in Jacques-Emile Blanche's description of them: 'Fantin studied each flower, its grain, its tissue, as if it were a human face.' But this is true with one proviso: he looked at flowers, as he did at faces, with no preconceptions. His belief, academic in origin, that technique in painting was separable from the subject to which the artist applied it, enabled him to see the blooms he painted not as botanical specimens, but as things which, though not necessarily significant in themselves, would generate significant art upon the canvas" (E. Lucie-Smith, Henri Fantin-Latour, New York, 1977, p. 22-23).
It was customary in the nineteenth century to consider flowers the most 'beautiful' and varied wonders in creation, but also the most ephemeral. In an article published in La Renaissance, the celebrated critic Arsne Alexandre extolled the virtues of Fantin's roses: "The rose is a queen that will never be dethroned. Besides, the greatest poets are never tired of portraying magnificent homage to her. She has become a many-sided symbol, the highest aspect of which glorifies the theme, and there is nothing more suavely penetrating than Schumann's Rose Pilgerfahrt, the Pilgrimage of the Rose. The sovereign flower makes numberless suggestions, and one understands how an Albert Samain could say that he adored roses "even to the point of pain" and how a Fantin-Latour could devote an important part of his work to them." (A. Alexandre, "Les roses de Fantin-Latour", La Renaissance, March 1930, p. 123-124.)
During the 1860s, still life painting became more and more important to Fantin-Latour, partly due to the measure of financial success it provided, but also because it was a means to understand the achievement of great masters of the past, like Velasquez and Rembrandt whom he greatly admired and had copied in the Louvre.
"Fantin's flower pieces have a special quality, which is well summed up in Jacques-Emile Blanche's description of them: 'Fantin studied each flower, its grain, its tissue, as if it were a human face.' But this is true with one proviso: he looked at flowers, as he did at faces, with no preconceptions. His belief, academic in origin, that technique in painting was separable from the subject to which the artist applied it, enabled him to see the blooms he painted not as botanical specimens, but as things which, though not necessarily significant in themselves, would generate significant art upon the canvas" (E. Lucie-Smith, Henri Fantin-Latour, New York, 1977, p. 22-23).
It was customary in the nineteenth century to consider flowers the most 'beautiful' and varied wonders in creation, but also the most ephemeral. In an article published in La Renaissance, the celebrated critic Arsne Alexandre extolled the virtues of Fantin's roses: "The rose is a queen that will never be dethroned. Besides, the greatest poets are never tired of portraying magnificent homage to her. She has become a many-sided symbol, the highest aspect of which glorifies the theme, and there is nothing more suavely penetrating than Schumann's Rose Pilgerfahrt, the Pilgrimage of the Rose. The sovereign flower makes numberless suggestions, and one understands how an Albert Samain could say that he adored roses "even to the point of pain" and how a Fantin-Latour could devote an important part of his work to them." (A. Alexandre, "Les roses de Fantin-Latour", La Renaissance, March 1930, p. 123-124.)