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HENRI FANTIN-LATOUR , GRENOBLE, 1836 - BURÉ, 1904 Aubépines Roses Oil on canvas 50 x 39 cm Surging into the frame, this flowering branch of red hawthorns bursts with freshness. Its tiny rose-like flowers sparkle on the surface of the canvas. No vase, it seems, could contain the vigour of this wild shrub. Using his painting as a 'window to the world', Fantin-Latour captures here a bit of raw nature as if this branch were sticking out of a window. But the dark background is there to remind us that this is a painting. If the treatment is realistic, it is also pictorial. The touch is always shown, asserted. This monochrome, indefinite and neutral background serves to highlight. The colours, first of all, and the luminosity that these flowers capture; but also the volumes, delicate and light, of this branch whose shadow is subtly projected behind, to anchor these flowers more firmly in a materiality. Here again, Fantin-Latour has no equal for fixing the life of freshly picked flora, for eternising the ephemeral. It is the whole of spring summed up in a bouquet. Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) was a French painter trained by his father, a portrait painter, 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 became fascinated by Venetian painting and its treatment of light, particularly in Titian and Veronese. He befriended Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot and 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 Hommage à Delacroix or 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, creating a true 'portrait of flowers' where poetry transcends the realism of the touch. Provenance: Edwin Edwards, London Williams & Son, London Private collection, Scotland Private collection, UK Sotheby's sale, London, 6 May 1959, lot 113) Frost & Reed, London (acquired at the above sale) Herbert Wilcox, London Sotheby's sale Parke Bernet, Los Angeles, 4 February 1975, lot 301 Private collection, New York. Appraisal: Brame & Lorenceau, Paris Signatur: Signed and dated upper right 'Fantin 1871' Literature: Mme Fantin-Latour, Catalogue de l'oeuvre complet de Fantin-Latour, Paris, 1911, no. 528, p. 65. This painting will be included in the catalogue raisonné of Fantin-Latour's paintings and pastels of the Galerie Brame & Lorenceau in preparation.