Tag: Henri Fantin-Latour

Mr and Mrs Edwin Edwards by Henri Fantin-Latour

Mr and Mrs Edwards by Henri Fantin-Latour (1875)

Who should be my next featured artist and what the next featured painting should be are the decisions I have to make each day.    Often I will make my choice when I flick through one of my art books or maybe I will be inspired by an artist or painting I have seen on one of my gallery visits but often or not the decision will come from research I have made into a previous painting.  My Daily Art Display featured artist and painting today comes from a little bit of all those.  In my last blog I looked at Manet’s Music at the Tuileries Gardens and listed a number of Manet’s friends the artist had added into his work.  One of these was the floral painter Henri Fantin-Latour.  Last week when I was wandering around the National Gallery in London I stood before one of his non-floral paintings entitled Mr and Mrs Edwin Edwards and my curiosity was immediately pricked.  Who were Mr and Mrs Edwards and why should this French artist paint the portraits of this English couple?   I knew then that sooner or later I had to feature this painting in one of my blogs and do some research into the background behind the work and the sitters.  So come with me on this journey of discovery and find out more about this couple.

Edwin Edwards was born in the small market town of Framlington in the heart of the Suffolk countryside in 1823.  He was the youngest of four sons of Charles Edwards and Mary Kersey.  He was educated at Dedham in Essex and went on to study law.  He became a legal practitioner in the admiralty and prerogative courts attaining the impressive position of King’s Proctor and Examiner of the Courts of Civil Law and the High Court of Admiralty.  When he was twenty-four he published a book entitled A treatise on the jurisdiction of the High Court of Admiralty of England.   In 1852 he married Elizabeth Ruth Escombe.  The couple had no children.  Despite having a busy and lucrative legal career Edwin Edwards had a great love for art and in 1861, aged thirty-eight years of age and with support from his wife, he decided to forego his legal career and become a full time artist.

Edwin Edwards had started painting using the medium of watercolours but later moved on to oil painting.  However his real love was etching and he had been influenced by the French artist and etcher Alphonse Legros.  He installed a press at his house in Sunbury, where his wife Ruth became skilled at printing. During the 1860s and 70s their home was a meeting place for French and British painters and etchers.  It was whilst he was in Paris  to arrange for the printing of his first plates that he was introduced to Henri Fantin-Latour by the English painter Matthew White Ridley.  Edwards and Fantin-Latour soon became great friends and the French artist would visit London and stay with the Edwards family in their Sudbury home.  Edwin Edwards and his wife bought many of Henri Fantin-Latour’s flower paintings, and found other buyers among their wealthy circle of friends thus securing the French artist a regular and steady income. Between 1864 and 1896 Fantin-Latour painted over 800 floral portraits, and almost all were purchased in England.

Molesey Lock by Edwin Edwards (1861)

In 1861 Edwards made an etching trip along the River Thames with James McNeil Whistler, Fantin-Latour and Whistler’s brother-in-law, Francis Seymour Hayden, an English surgeon, who later dedicated his life to etching and printmaking and it was during this trip that Edwin Edwards completed a portrait of Whistler sketching, seated, at Molesey lock.   In all, Edwards completed over three hundred and fifty etchings consisting of scenes of the Thames at Sunbury, English cathedral cities, the wild Cornish coast, and countryside scenes in Suffolk, many of which are now housed in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.  He also published a three-volume work entitled ‘Old Inns of England,’ which were illustrated with a number of his etchings.

From 1861 until his death in 1879, aged 56, he was a prolific exhibitor of his work.  He exhibited fifty four works at the Royal Academy and over a hundred of his works at various other exhibitions.

My Daily Art Display featured painting is simply entitled Mr and Mrs Edwin Edwards by Henri Faintin-Latour.  The painting belongs to the Tate but is presently on loan to the National Gallery, London.  When Fantin-Latour first visited and stayed with Edwards and his wife in 1861 he began a portrait of Mrs Edwards but did not finish it until three years later when he again stayed with the couple.  It was not until the end of 1874 that Fantin-Latour embarked on the double portrait of Edwin Edwards and his wife and the couple visited his Paris studio for the formal sittings.  He wrote to Edwards and said that he intended to portray him, seated at a table in his studio, etching.  The background would have a number of canvases on the wall and that his wife would be portrayed standing behind him, overseeing his work, like a “guardian angel, the inspiring Muse”.   In reality the painting was much simpler than Fantin-Latour had originally envisaged.  The background as you see is plain and not adorned with other paintings.  Instead of being depicted etching,  Edwin Edwards is seen seated at an angle with his left arm resting on a folio of prints whilst studying an etching he holds in his right hand.  Mrs Edwards as was Fantin-Latour’s original idea stands behind her husband.  Does she look like a guardian angel?  It is hard to interpret her mood.  It seems one of aloofness and displeasure and seems somewhat unhappy with the situation.  I think she actually dominates the double portrait and would some up her appearance as “she who must be obeyed” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Henri Fantin-Latour exhibited the work in the Paris Salon of 1875 and it gained a second class medal.  This award was very beneficial to Fantin-Latour because from then on he was termed by the Paris Salon as hors concours, which meant that in future, any exhibits he put forward for inclusion at future Salon exhibitions did not have to first be passed by the Salon jury.

Un atelier aux Batignolles (A Studio at Les Batignolles) by Henri Fantin-Latour

Un atelier aux Batignolles (A Studio at Les Batignolles)

Today I am looking at a work of art by the French painter, Henri Fantin-Latour, or to give him his full name, Ignace-Henri-Jean-Théodore Fantin-Latour.  The family was of Italian ancestry and the “Fantin” part of the name came from the fact that some of the ancestors hailed from the southern Italian town of San-Fantino.  In the 17th century, a Jean Fantin added “Latour” to the name of Fantin.

Henri was born in Grenoble in 1836.  His father, Theodore Fantin-Latour, originally from Metz, was a society portraitist painter.   In 1841 the family moved to Paris.  Having shown a liking for drawing at an early age, he received his initial artistic training from his father.  Then at the age of fourteen, he enrolled on a three-year course at the École de Dessin of the French artist and drawing instructor, Lecoq de Boisbaudran.  Following this, he spent a short time at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.  During his art student days he spent most of his time at the Louvre copying the painting of the old Masters as well as making many visits to the Musée de Luxembourg to study and copy the works of Eugene Delacroix.  In 1861, after he graduated from the art schools he worked for a time at the atelier of Gustave Courbet and supported himself by earning money as a copyist.

During his time copying paintings at the Louvre he came across and became friends with a number of the future Impressionists, such as Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot.   In 1858, he struck up a special friendship with the American-born artist James Whistler and along with French-born English painter Alphonse Legros he founded the art group known as the Société des Trois.   Whistler, who had moved to London, invited Henri over for a visit which he accepted and through the good auspices of his two friends Whistler and Legros he was introduced to the art world of London.  This was the first of many trips to London made by Fantin-Latour.  One very important introduction whilst there was to Edwin Edwards, who had trained as a lawyer but also practiced as an artist and etcher.  He acted as Henri Fantin-Latour’s agent in England and found him many buyers for his floral paintings as well as a number of patrons.

Henri Fantin-Latour had started painting a number of works of art featuring floral still-lifes and these were well received in London although strangely enough never popular in France during his lifetime.  Henri Fantin-Latour exhibited a number of his works at the Paris Salon in 1861 and 1862  and later in 1863, at the Salon des Refusés, and  he exhibited regularly at the London Royal Academy.  Although he had been close friends to a number of the Impressionists, he never put up any of his paintings for their eight Impressionist Exhibitions.  The reason for that decision was probably due to the fact that although he counted them as friends, he disagreed with their artistic theories and philosophy.  His artistic style was more conservative.

Henri-Fantin Latour will always be remembered for his luxurious floral paintings but he was an artist who painted many group portraits and it through these works that we get an insight into the friendship between the now-famous artists, poets, musicians and writers of that era.  During his time as an artist he also completed no fewer than twenty three self-portraits.

In 1875, aged thirty nine, Henri Fantin-Latour married a fellow painter, Victoria Dubourg and the couple spent their summers at the country estate of his in-laws at Buré.  In 1879 Henri Fantin-Latour was awarded the Legion d’Honneur medal.  Henri Fantin Latour died in 1904, aged 68 and was buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.

The painting I am featuring today was not one of Fantin-Latour’s beautiful floral works of art but instead I am going to look at one of his group portraits. It is very like a painting I featured in My Daily Art Display on November 10th 2011 entitled Bazille’s Studio; rue de la Condamine by Frédéric Bazille, who also actually appears in today’s painting.

My painting today is entitled Un atelier aux Batignolles (A Studio at Les Batignolles) and he completed it in 1870.  Batignolles is part of the 17th arondissement of the city of Paris.  At the time of Fantin-Latour, this was a cultural hive of activity and served as a base for young painters such as Édouard Manet and many of his artist friends who, because of the locality, became known as Le groupe des Batignolles.  The painting today is a kind of “who’s who” of that group.   It is more than just that.  In some ways it is Henri Fantin-Latour paying homage to his friend Manet.

We are in the atelier of Édouard Manet and we see him sitting at his easel. He concentrates on the man sitting in the other chair, the subject of his painting, Zacharie Astruc.  Astruc was a painter, poet, sculptor and art critic who had rallied to support the likes of Courbet and Manet and the Impressionist group of painters when they were constantly being criticized.   Standing around and watching the artist at work are some of his friends.  At the far left of the painting, seen standing directly behind Manet is the German painter Otto Schölderer.  Next to him, wearing a hat, is Auguste Renoir.  Further to the right of the painting and almost in the background, are Emile Zola, the writer who also championed the cause of the Impressionists in their struggle with the Salon and its condemnation of this new grouping of artists, Edmond Maître another supporter of the Impressionist painters and who was, at the time, a civil servant at the town hall.  Almost hidden in the corner of the painting is Claude Monet.   Standing tall and upright behind the chair with a full beard is the twenty-six year old, Frédéric Bazille, who two months after this painting was completed was killed in the Franco-Prussian War.  There is a  formal air to this group portrait.  The men are all dressed in somber dark suits and their expressions are serious and unsmiling.   All these young artists had suffered at the hands of the art critics of the day.  They and their paintings were accused as being frivolous and contrary to what the art establishment was used to.  It is possibly for that reason that Henri Fantin-Latour decided to depict the gathering so formally and with an air of respectability.  Could this desire to show how these young artists had not completely put the antique traditions of the Academics of the Salon behind them be the reason why the artist has included a statuette of Minerva on the table at the left of the painting?  In my last blog regarding Monet and Camille Doncieux I mentioned that all things Japanese were the rage in Paris and France in the late nineteenth century.  Look how Fantin-Latour has positioned a Japanese stoneware vase next top Minerva in the painting.

This work by Henri Fantin-Latour is almost a historical painting.  It records for us a time in history when these characters were leaving their mark.  Each one of them is posing for posterity.  Zola once wrote about the struggle these artists had to endure and the way in which Édouard Manet tried to rally them when they became dispirited.  He wrote:
“…Around the painter so disparaged by the public has grown up a common front of painters and writers who claim him as a master…”

Henri Fantin-Latour put forward the painting to be exhibited at the 1870 Salon  The painting was accepted and he was awarded a  medal by the salon for this work of art.  In spite of his close relationship with the Impressionist painters he never followed their artistic techniques.  He remained a traditionalist and remained faithful to that traditional technique. In the latter part of his career he painted less and concentrated on lithography.

Did you wonder whether Manet was actually painting a picture of Zacharie Astruc as depicted in today’s featured work?  Who knows, but coincidentally, Manet did complete a portrait of Astruc four years earlier in 1866, which now hangs at the Kunsthalle in Bremen………………….

Portrait of Zacharie Astruc by Manet (1866)