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Self-Portrait
1861
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Henri
Fantin-Latour |
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(1836- 1904) |
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b
Grenoble, 14 Jan 1836; d Buré, Orne, 25 Aug 1904.
Painter and printmaker. He
studied with his father, Jean-Théodore Fantin-Latour (1805–75), from 1846 and then
with Horace Lecocq de Boisbaudran at the Petite Ecole de Dessin in Paris from 1850 to
1856. His apprenticeship was based on copying the Old Masters before beginning to study
from nature. He had a growing enthusiasm for the Italian painters, particularly Titian and
Veronese, whom he copied in the Louvre, Paris, from 1852. The Dream (1854;
Grenoble, Mus. Grenoble) is one of the first of a series of imaginary scenes in which
Fantin-Latour concentrated on the theme of vision, which he later continued in his
representations of scenes from various operas. He met François Bonvin and Félix
Bracquemond in 1853 and went to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1854, but he left before the
end of the year. He began to paint the life around him and did a series of self-portraits
from 1854 to 1861, such as Self-portrait Seated at the Easel (1858; Berlin, Alte
N.G.) and Self-portrait (1859; Grenoble, Mus. Grenoble). These two directions—Realism
and fantasy—were already clearly defined when he met Gustave Courbet in 1859. For
several months in 1861 he was a pupil at Courbet’s studio, but from the start he
tempered the brutal Realism of his master with a discreet intimacy in such works as the Two
Sisters (1859; St Louis, MO, A. Mus.), Woman Reading (1861; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay)
and Reading (1863; Tournai, Mus. B.-A.). By rejecting the anecdotal aspect of
genre, Fantin-Latour heightened the tension inherent in a contrast between the physical
proximity of the models and their psychological distance, creating a sense of solitude. |
