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Lot Essay
Galerie Brame & Lorenceau will include this painting in their forthcoming Fantin-Latour catalogue raisonné.
During the 1860s, still life painting became increasingly 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 perceptions. 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, pp. 22-23).
During the 1860s, still life painting became increasingly 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 perceptions. 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, pp. 22-23).