Henri Fantin-Latour - Peinture intimiste

Even if Henri Fantin-Latour went through the Parisian workshop of Gustave Courbet, it was through Whistler and especially through Manet that he was influenced, as evidenced by a workshop at the Batignolles, where we see some artists of the new generation gravitated around Édouard Manet. Manet was their lighthouse at night, a demanding, talented and bold guide who made fun of academic conventions like them. As for Whistler, he was the one who initiated Fantin-Latour to the refined art of the Japanese, he was the one who introduced him to the English painters, he was the one who facilitated his trip to England and made him meet the pre-Raphaelites. Whistler, Manet and Fantin-Latour will all be refused at the 1859 Salon and will migrate from concert to the workshop of the painter François Bonvin. The Louvre, there is only the Louvre, said Fantin-Latour, and we must not be surprised. He had first been the student of his father, a drawing teacher trained according to the classical tradition. He then followed the teaching of Lecoque de Boisbeaudran, a rather innovative pedagogue who asked his students to carefully observe an object before drawing it from memory. This may seem banal, but in reality this teaching encouraged the artists to develop their personal imagination. Apart from Fantin-Latour, Chéret, Dalou and Rodin were the students of Lecoque de Boisbeaudran. If Henri Fantin-Latour can be considered as a kind of missing link between the Romantics and the Impressionists, although his federative role was underestimated, he also makes the link between his movements and the symbolism to which a common passion for Berlioz and Wagner connects him. Thus, for several years, Fantin-Latour collaborated on the famous Wagnerian Review and painted or lithographed innumerable Wagnerian subjects. Curiously, in front of La Nuit, exhibited at the 1897 Salon, critics praised the fact that he had finally abandoned his musical maraud. «Rien n'est resté», wrote one of them without laughing, «de la défroque romantique et wagnerienne trop longtemps chère à ce grand pain». We wonder what this same critic thought in front of his Entrée des Dieux at the Valhalla, which dates from the following year, or in front of this prelude of Lohengrin, performed four years later, which illustrates the precise moment when in the prelude of Wagner's opera, titled L'homme pur, receives the Holy Grail, If this series of lithographies makes Fantin-Latour a completely honest symbolist, if his numerous portraits, in particular of groups, make him the precious witness of an era that has never evolved, it is in the delicate art of the dead nature that he gave all his mastery, with a sense of light and grace that belong only to him. Thus, can we consider these paintings of flowers as a model of intimist painting? The expression «nature morte», which qualifies the representation of inert objects, is translated from Dutch «tien leven», which means «silent life». Even if the art of the ancient Egyptians is full of objects supposed to accompany their owners in the afterlife, it is true that it is the Flemish masters who gave the dead nature its letters of nobility. If the French Revolution, through its social upheavals, made this art somewhat caducal, because it must be remembered that it was first intended to adorn the chimney tops of the aristocracy, neoclassics as well as romantics prudently despised it, and it was necessary to wait for the naturalists and the impressionists to reactivate it. But the dead nature is now a source of new motivations. If Van Gogh painted a pair of old shoes to symbolize his living conditions, Cézanne made each object a motif among others, as well as a landscape or a character. So, once again, Henri Fantin-Latour plays his body defending the missing channels, throwing a precious bridge between the plastic research of the cubists and the art of light. And his sublime bouquets of flowers make him the enlightened continuator of the luminous Jean-Simeon Chardin.