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Lot Essay
Galerie Brame & Lorenceau will include this painting in their forthcoming Fantin-Latour catalogue raisonné.
Fantin-Latour painted all varieties of flowers, often mixing them in a single composition, but it is as a painter of roses that he became best known in the latter part of the 19th century. Roses were extremely popular in Victorian England, where Fantin developed the most steady and reliable market for his flower paintings. England surpassed France to become the world's leader in rose cultivation; a rosarium constructed in Abner Park Cemetery, northeast London, in 1840 possessed a collection numbering more than one thousand cultivars, varieties and species.
The rose is the supreme test of a flower-painter's skill: the artist needs to 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 (the latter developed by the Victorians) - while at the same time suggesting the lightness and delicacy of the individual petals. The painter Jacques-Émile Blanche wrote in 1906:
"It is in his roses that Fantin has no equal. The rose - so complicated in its design, contours and colour, in its rolls and curls, now fluted like the decoration, of a fashionable hat, round and smooth, now like a button or a woman's breast - no one understood them better than Fantin. He confers a kind of nobility on the rose, which so many watercolourists have rendered insipid and insignificant by their bits of colouring on vellum, screens, and fans. He bathes it in light and air, uncovering with the point of his scraper the canvas beneath layers of colour, so creating these interstices through which the painting breathes... He captures the physiognomy of the flower he is copying; it is that particular flower and not another on the same stem: he draws and constructs the flower, and does not satisfy himself with giving an impression of it through bright, cleverly juxtaposed splashes of colour" ("Fantin-Latour," in Revue de Paris, 15 May 1906, pp. 311-312).
By the mid-1870s Fantin had despaired of winning due notice for his flower paintings in official Paris Salon, and an association with the dealer Durand-Ruel lasted only a few years. Edwin and Ruth Edwards continued to act as his exclusive agents in England, and such was the desirability of his flower paintings there that Fantin no longer depended on arranged commissions and the accompanying requirements that determined the content of his compositions - he was free to paint as he wished, with reasonable certainty that his pictures would find eager buyers. "Edwards sells what I paint," Fantin wrote to his friend Otto Scholderer in 1871, "I am able to live quietly... doing what I please, thanks to Edwards" (quoted in Fantin-Latour, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1983, p. 256). He dispensed with complicated compositions best appreciated by other painters, preferring to work with simpler arrangements in which he was able to focus attention on the sensuous qualities of the blossoms themselves, as his collectors liked. He would eventually tire of doing flowers, but not during the period he painted the present picture; he wrote to Scholderer during the summer of 1879, "I am painting flowers because one must take advantage of the moment, and this year I find the flowers more beautiful than ever" (quoted in ibid., p. 257).
Fantin-Latour painted all varieties of flowers, often mixing them in a single composition, but it is as a painter of roses that he became best known in the latter part of the 19th century. Roses were extremely popular in Victorian England, where Fantin developed the most steady and reliable market for his flower paintings. England surpassed France to become the world's leader in rose cultivation; a rosarium constructed in Abner Park Cemetery, northeast London, in 1840 possessed a collection numbering more than one thousand cultivars, varieties and species.
The rose is the supreme test of a flower-painter's skill: the artist needs to 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 (the latter developed by the Victorians) - while at the same time suggesting the lightness and delicacy of the individual petals. The painter Jacques-Émile Blanche wrote in 1906:
"It is in his roses that Fantin has no equal. The rose - so complicated in its design, contours and colour, in its rolls and curls, now fluted like the decoration, of a fashionable hat, round and smooth, now like a button or a woman's breast - no one understood them better than Fantin. He confers a kind of nobility on the rose, which so many watercolourists have rendered insipid and insignificant by their bits of colouring on vellum, screens, and fans. He bathes it in light and air, uncovering with the point of his scraper the canvas beneath layers of colour, so creating these interstices through which the painting breathes... He captures the physiognomy of the flower he is copying; it is that particular flower and not another on the same stem: he draws and constructs the flower, and does not satisfy himself with giving an impression of it through bright, cleverly juxtaposed splashes of colour" ("Fantin-Latour," in Revue de Paris, 15 May 1906, pp. 311-312).
By the mid-1870s Fantin had despaired of winning due notice for his flower paintings in official Paris Salon, and an association with the dealer Durand-Ruel lasted only a few years. Edwin and Ruth Edwards continued to act as his exclusive agents in England, and such was the desirability of his flower paintings there that Fantin no longer depended on arranged commissions and the accompanying requirements that determined the content of his compositions - he was free to paint as he wished, with reasonable certainty that his pictures would find eager buyers. "Edwards sells what I paint," Fantin wrote to his friend Otto Scholderer in 1871, "I am able to live quietly... doing what I please, thanks to Edwards" (quoted in Fantin-Latour, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1983, p. 256). He dispensed with complicated compositions best appreciated by other painters, preferring to work with simpler arrangements in which he was able to focus attention on the sensuous qualities of the blossoms themselves, as his collectors liked. He would eventually tire of doing flowers, but not during the period he painted the present picture; he wrote to Scholderer during the summer of 1879, "I am painting flowers because one must take advantage of the moment, and this year I find the flowers more beautiful than ever" (quoted in ibid., p. 257).