Henri Fantin-Latour

Mrs. Edwin Edwards, London
F. & J. Tempelaere, Paris
Bonjean, Paris
Félix Gérard, Paris
Henri Vian (sold: Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, November 27, 1919, lot 4)
The Lefevre Gallery (Alex. Reid. and Lefevre, Ltd.), London (acquired at the above sale)
Durand-Ruel, Paris
R.S. McLaughlin, Ottawa
Private Collection, Toronto (sold: Sotheby's, New York, November 11, 1988, lot 1)
Acquired at the above sale

Madame Fantin-Latour, Catalogue de l'oeuvre complet de Fantin-Latour, Paris, 1911, no. 1510, listed p. 160 (as dating from 1891)

Fantin painted this still-life of a basket of dahlias for his most important patron, Mrs. Edwin Edwards.  Throughout the 1890s, Mrs. Edwards commissioned several pictures of floral arrangements from the artist, many of which depict the abundant bouquets bursting from the canvas.  This picture, with its crispness and startling realism, demonstrates the best of Fantin's expertise in this area.  Around the time he completed this work in 1893, Fantin had grown weary of this motif and longed to return to portraiture, a genre which had been an important part of his early career.  His patrons like Edwards, however, felt differently.  Until his death in 1904 and at the behest of his clients Fantin continued to paint dozens of compositions of bud vases and elaborate bouquets, all which have come to define his career as an artist.

Because of the extraordinary eye for detail that he had developed as a portrait painter, Fantin was capable of seeing each flower with remarkable specificity.  According to Edward Lucie-Smith, "His belief, academic in origin, that techinique in painting was separable from the subject to which the artist applied it, enabled him to see the blooms he painted not as botanical specimens, but as things which, though not necessarily significant in themselves, would generate significant art upon the canvas. At the same time, the naturalist bias of the milieu in which he had been brought up encouraged him to try and give a completely objective description of all the nuances of colour and form which he saw in the bouquet he had arranged” (Edward Lucie-Smith, Henri Fantin-Latour, New York, 1977, pp. 22-23).