The Work of a Captivating Artist
Though the French painter Henri Fantin-Latour initially sought academic fame through portraiture, it was his still lifes that made him truly renowned during his painting career, as they demonstrated his remarkable capacity to bring life and harmony to simple, everyday objects like flowers.
Fantin-Latour quickly realized there was a more eager audience for his flower paintings in Great Britain than in France. He first traveled to London in 1859 at the suggestion of fellow artist James McNeill Whistler, whom he met while copying Old Masters at the Louvre the year before, and who purchased several of Fantin-Latour’s early still lifes. He returned to London many times after, enjoying a market that proved extremely lucrative and provided him with reliable income.
On his second trip to London in 1862, Fantin-Latour was introduced to Edwin Edwards, an important lawyer and keen collector who subsequently became his dear friend and agent. Under his patronage, timid-natured Fantin-Latour was free to paint as he wished, surrounded by flowers, away from the noisy Parisian crowds, which he avoided his entire life. “I am able to live quietly…doing what I please, thanks to Edwards,” he wrote to his friend Otto Scholderer in 1871, the same year he completed Narcisses Simples et Doubles dans un Verre Long, which Freeman’s brought to market in 2018.
Art criticism of the day was not always kind toward Fantin-Latour’s flower paintings. Still life artists were not considered part of the vanguard of the avant-garde movement when Fantin-Latour began dabbling in the genre. Even when he tried to promote his still lifes in France, he faced severe criticism by the French Académie and Salon officials; they ranked still lifes at the bottom of the hierarchy of artists’ subjects.
To contemporaneous critics, Fantin-Latour’s paintings were repetitive and lacked originality—simply a response to the market’s high demand, having more in common with the works of everyday artists Alexandre Desgoffe or Philippe Rousseau than those of future celebrities Paul Cézanne or Paul Sérusier.
“The problem with [Fantin-Latour’s] still life paintings isn’t that we don't care for them,” Laurent Salomé explains in Fantin-Latour: À Fleur de Peau, an exhibition catalog from 2016, “we simply do not really know what to say about them.” He continues: “We are in the presence of an immense and enigmatic work, as mute as the flowers the artist produces, which, like them, seems to conceal some important secrets about existence.”
This statement applies particularly well to Narcisses Simples et Doubles dans un Verre Long. The canvas was painted at a point in Fantin-Latour’s career when he struggled to make each work fresh and new, having painted still lifes for over a decade. His biggest fear, voiced to both Edwards and his wife in numerous letters, was that he would ultimately become a “fabricator” of still lifes, and “because of this fear, [he] promised [himself] to always paint them with painstaking care” (letter to Edwards, March 2, 1865).
Likely executed in England, the work shows the extent to which Fantin-Latour embraced a pure still life aesthetic, prepared with subtle color contrasts, namely creamy whites and dark blacks. The flowers, carefully arranged in a simple yet elegant vase, are set against a characteristically muted background, rapidly painted so as to not “distract the attention to be paid to the flowers” (as Fantin-Latour himself wrote, later quoted in an exhibition catalog from 1983).
Still and calm, Fantin-Latour’s daffodils seem isolated from the world. They have an emotional quality that Jacques-Emile Blanche described best when he said that “Fantin studied each flower, each petal, its grain, its tissue, as if it were a human face.”
Fantin-Latour developed an extraordinary eye for detail as a portraitist that he later used to depict each flower with remarkable singularity, treating each as an independent sitter. He provides this bouquet of flowers with the dignity, mystery, and even sensuality of a portrait. One can compare the daffodil stems to rebellious strands of hair and the vase to a dress: rigid, sophisticated, and yet transparent, revealing the elegant stems.
By depicting the narcissus flower, Fantin-Latour also plays with the myth associated with the flower itself, which owes its name to the young hunter Narcissus, who tragically drowned in the pool where he contemplated his own reflection.
Traditionally associated with narcissism and conceit, here the flowers appear free from this negative symbolism. Instead, Fantin-Latour arranges them as a modest bouquet, enriching them with a personal touch reminiscent of his delicate yet powerful personality. Just like the aromatic daffodil—which only grows in wooded and shady areas—the artist shyly reveals a part of himself before withdrawing into the shadows, leaving us with a painting where raw passion lies on the surface.
Narcisses exemplifies a new philosophy, lifestyle, and, to an extent, a social model that Fantin-Latour set for himself and his generation. Fantin-Latour was emblematic of the “New Artist” who only considered his work in the face of history. To that extent, the painting references the art of the past more clearly than the radical concepts put forth by the artists of his generation.
Here, Fantin-Latour looks to the work of 18th-century French still life master Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin to bring to canvas the vision of peaceful, bourgeois simplicity. The vase is refined without being too precious; the bouquet itself is bright, but not too complex. By keeping his composition simple, Fantin-Latour ultimately abandons the traditional rhetoric that would only complicate his work.
Though his works appear beautifully simple, Fantin-Latour devoted copious amounts of time to determining composition. Despite his close friendships with many Impressionists, the artist did not adopt their method of en plein air painting; he cut his flowers from the garden and went inside to arrange and paint them. There, he could methodically control the light and atmosphere of his paintings.
Like he said to his friend Otto Scholderer in 1872,
"I have many things to tell you still, but it is getting late and one needs to get up early tomorrow to finish a bouquet that has already withered. My life is among flowers.”