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Lot Essay
The freshness and variety in Henri Fantin-Latour's floral still-lifes attests 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, 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 at Buri, France. In the present work, the combination of diverse species makes a splendid bouquet, including roses, hollyhocks, clematis, love-in-the-mist, white phlox and white mallows. Among Fantin-Latour's best floral still-lifes, Bouquet de fleurs is remarkable in the meticulous quality of the brushwork, the brilliant character of the light, and the dynamism within the arrangement. As Michel Hoog has written about the present work, "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 to be found in any bouquet', in the words of Mallarmé (1887). 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" (M. Hoog in op. cit., exh. cat., 1982-1983, p. 273).
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 at Buri, France. In the present work, the combination of diverse species makes a splendid bouquet, including roses, hollyhocks, clematis, love-in-the-mist, white phlox and white mallows. Among Fantin-Latour's best floral still-lifes, Bouquet de fleurs is remarkable in the meticulous quality of the brushwork, the brilliant character of the light, and the dynamism within the arrangement. As Michel Hoog has written about the present work, "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 to be found in any bouquet', in the words of Mallarmé (1887). 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" (M. Hoog in op. cit., exh. cat., 1982-1983, p. 273).