Galerie Dreyfus
29
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HENRI FANTIN-LATOUR (GRENOBLE, 1836 – BURÉ, 1904)
Pink Hawth…
See original version (French)
29
-
HENRI FANTIN-LATOUR (GRENOBLE, 1836 – BURÉ, 1904)
Pink Hawth…
See original version (French)
Estimate €75,000 - €90,000
Voluntary lot
Description
HENRI FANTIN-LATOUR
(GRENOBLE, 1836 – BURÉ, 1904)
Pink Hawthorns
1871
Oil on canvas
50 x 39 cm.
Signed and dated in the top right-hand corner ‘Fantin 1871
’
Provenance
Edwin Edwards, London
Williams & Son, London
Private collection, Scotland
Private collection, United Kingdom
Sotheby’s auction, London, 6 May 1959, lot 113)
Frost & Reed, London (acquired at the above auction)
Herbert Wilcox, London
Sotheby’s Parke Bernet auction, Los Angeles, 4 February 1975, lot 301
Private collection, New York.
Bibliography
Mme Fantin-Latour, Catalogue de l’œuvre 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 by the
Brame & Lorenceau Gallery, currently in preparation.
Appraisal: Brame & Lorenceau, Paris.
Emerging from the frame, this branch of red hawthorn blossoms bursts with freshness. Its
tiny rose-shaped 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 onto the world’, Fantin-Latour captures here a fragment of untamed nature, as if this branch were protruding from a window frame. But the dark background is there to remind us that this is a painting. Whilst the treatment is realistic, it is also intended to be pictorial. The brushstrokes are always visible and assertive. This monochrome, undefined and neutral background serves to set the scene. First and foremost, it highlights the colours and the light captured by these flowers; but it also emphasises the delicate, light volumes of the branches, whose shadow is subtly cast backwards, further grounding these flowers in their physicality.
Here again, Fantin-Latour is unrivalled in his ability to capture the life of freshly picked flowers, to
immortalise the ephemeral. It is the whole of spring distilled into a single bouquet.
Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) was a French painter trained by his father, a portraitist, from whom he
acquired a great talent for the genre. He subsequently continued his education at the École des Beaux-
Arts in Paris. A regular at the Louvre, where he copied the great masters, he developed a passion for
Venetian painting and its treatment of light, particularly in the works of Titian and Veronese. He became friends
with Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot and later James Whistler, who took him to England and
introduced him to a clientele who were captivated by his still lifes and floral paintings. A friend of the
realist painter Gustave Courbet, yet also close to the Impressionist circle, he nevertheless retained
his own distinctive style and turned his attention to group portraits, the most famous of which are
held at the Musée d’Orsay, such as *Homage to Delacroix* and *The Studio at Batignolles*. Having retired to
Buré, in Normandy, towards the end of his life, he devoted himself almost exclusively to his bouquets of
flowers, which he picked from his garden; this branch of hawthorn is a splendid example
of their freshness and natural beauty. Fantin-Latour seems, in fact, to sum up his entire art in this work by
creating a true ‘portrait of flowers’ in which poetry transcends the realism of the brushstrokes.
See original version (French)
Auto-translation. Refer to original language for legal validity.
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
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