In the beginning,” the elderly Edgar Degas recalled, “Fantin, Whistler and I, we were all on the same road from Holland.”
What he meant was that in the early 1860s, just as the moribund polarities in French painting between the neo-classical and Romantic schools were giving way to the full-blooded realism of Gustav Courbet, he was among a band of young artists who aspired to bring up-to-date the Dutch 17th-century landscape, portrait, still life and genre traditions.
One of the artists Degas mentions was Henri Fantin-Latour, painter of that great aubade to the Romantic movement, Homage à Delacroix, the 1864 group portrait in which (among others) Baudelaire, Manet, Whistler and Fantin-Latour himself boldly stake their claim to the leadership of the cultural avant-garde.
Whistler and Manet in their different ways went on to become two of the most progressive artists working in European painting during the second half of the century. Fantin-Latour did not. Neither reactionary nor innovator, his absolute dislike of plein-air painting and preference for a nearly monochromatic palette set him apart from the generation of young artists who allied themselves with the Impressionists.
Yet there is something schizophrenic about Fantin-Latour’s talent. On the one hand he was a portraitist of extraordinary ambition and psychological acuity whose works in the genre always impress but never enthral. His chilly, grey-black palette, the emotional distance he keeps from his sitters, and the stiff poses contrived in the interest of compositional balance rather than for natural effect cast a funereal pall over all his group portraits.
What he meant was that in the early 1860s, just as the moribund polarities in French painting between the neo-classical and Romantic schools were giving way to the full-blooded realism of Gustav Courbet, he was among a band of young artists who aspired to bring up-to-date the Dutch 17th-century landscape, portrait, still life and genre traditions.
One of the artists Degas mentions was Henri Fantin-Latour, painter of that great aubade to the Romantic movement, Homage à Delacroix, the 1864 group portrait in which (among others) Baudelaire, Manet, Whistler and Fantin-Latour himself boldly stake their claim to the leadership of the cultural avant-garde.
Whistler and Manet in their different ways went on to become two of the most progressive artists working in European painting during the second half of the century. Fantin-Latour did not. Neither reactionary nor innovator, his absolute dislike of plein-air painting and preference for a nearly monochromatic palette set him apart from the generation of young artists who allied themselves with the Impressionists.
Yet there is something schizophrenic about Fantin-Latour’s talent. On the one hand he was a portraitist of extraordinary ambition and psychological acuity whose works in the genre always impress but never enthral. His chilly, grey-black palette, the emotional distance he keeps from his sitters, and the stiff poses contrived in the interest of compositional balance rather than for natural effect cast a funereal pall over all his group portraits.
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