Poppies

This is an exquisite example of Henri Fantin-Latour’s popular flowerpieces. By means of the thinnest, most economical, paint layer, the artist succeeded in capturing the texture and fragility of a bunch of white field poppies. Significantly, the whiteness of the petals has been augmented with touches of pale yellow and blue-grey pigment. The genre of flower painting was lucrative and one that the artist returned to frequently throughout his career. The flowers were usually arranged in a vase or bowl and placed on a piece of furniture adjacent to a dark wall, thereby enclosing a shallow interior space.

A friend of Eugène Delacroix and Édouard Manet, Fantin-Latour studied at the École des Beaux Arts and exhibited in the infamous Salon des Refusés of 1863. He also painted a number of group portraits, including Homage to Delacroix, 1864 (Musée d’Orsay), featuring, among others, the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire and artists James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Félix Bracquemond and Manet; and A Studio in Les Batignolles, 1870 (Musée d’Orsay), in which Manet is surrounded in his atelier by fellow artists, who include Frédéric Bazille, Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, as well as the novelist and critic Émile Zola.

Tony Magnusson, Curator of European Art, 2016–18