작품 상세

HENRI FANTIN-LATOUR , GRENOBLE, 1836 - BURÉ, 1904 Still life with grapes in a glass bowl and basket of herbs Oil on canvas 37 x 53 cm The velvety quality of the materials here competes with their brightness. It is the light that shapes these elements and gives them their texture. The neutral brown background fades away to make room for the presence of these fruits and their receptacle. In a sober and elegant setting, the painter plays with contrasts by arranging herbs and grapes in two containers that are in stark contrast: a wicker basket, rustic, and a crystal bowl, precious. Far from seeking to evoke any kind of symbolism, Fantin-Latour explores the interplay of materials, their aesthetic rendering but also their poetic force. His palette, subtle and restricted, runs through the tones of a soft green, declining to the red ochre of the more mature grains and then of the woven wicker. The sobriety of the composition is also that of the palette, which is limited to two complementary colours, red and green, to achieve balance and harmony. A colourist in search of a faithful reproduction of nature, Fantin-Latour signs here a piece of chromatic poetry. Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) was a French painter trained by his father, a portraitist, from whom he acquired a great talent for this genre. He then continued his education at the Ecole des Beaux-arts in Paris. Familiar with the Louvre, where he copied the great masters, he developed a passion for Venetian painting and its treatment of light, particularly in Titian and Veronese. He became friends with Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot and then James Whistler, who took him to England and introduced him to a clientele that was enamoured of his still lifes and flowers. A friend of the realist painter Gustave Courbet but also close to the Impressionist circle, he nevertheless kept his own style and oriented his painting towards group portraits, the most famous of which are preserved in the Musée d'Orsay, such as the Hommage à Delacroix or the Atelier aux Batignolles. Retired to Buré, in Normandy, at the end of his life, he devoted himself almost exclusively to his bouquets of flowers that he gathered in his garden, of which this branch of hawthorns is an admirable example in its freshness and naturalness. Fantin-Latour seems, in fact, to sum up all his art in this work, creating a true 'portrait of flowers' where poetry transcends the realism of the touch. Provenance: The work will be reproduced in the catalogue raisonné of Brame and Lorenceau Signatur: Signed and dated 'Fantin 82' in the upper left