Interpretive Resource

One of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century still-life painting, Still Life: Corner of a Table, was painted for the Salon of 1873. That year, Henri Fantin-Latour was enjoying increased public recognition and had just completed a sale of several canvases to the prominent art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Having won a medal at the Salon of 1870 for his entry An Atelier in the Batignolles (Musee d’Orsay, Paris), he expected to be exempt from jury examination and, therefore, to paint without concern for the whims of the judges. He decided to use the opportunity to execute this ambitious composition. The painting relates to Fantin’s largest and most famous canvas of the decade, The Corner of a Table, now in the Musee d’Orsay, Paris. An immense figural composition sent to the Salon of the previous year, that earlier work includes detailed portraits of Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and six of their contemporaries. These major young Parisian poets and writers are carefully placed around a table on which are arranged many of the still-life elements chosen again by Fantin for the composition reproduced here. In both paintings, the tables are covered with a white tablecloth and feature the same wine pitcher, glass of red wine, empty tea cup, sugar bowl, cruet, and glass dish. In the Art Institute version, Fantin made a considered effort to create a "natural," random arrangement of the objects in a room not populated by the human "genius" of young writers, but by the presence of a delicate rhododendron blooming indoors. These flowers, silhouetted against the white tablecloth, are dramatically placed at the front of the picture plane and suggest the influence of Japanese prints, with which Fantin and his contemporaries were quite familiar. At first rejected by the Salon, but finally accepted in a reconsideration, Still Life: Corner of a Table was compared, by some critics, with a group of masterful still lifes undertaken in the eighteenth century by Jean Simeon Chardin, which had entered the Louvre in 1869. Like those of that earlier artist, Fantin’s reflective, transparent, and translucent objects give play to gentle indoor light with a wonderful, quiet poetry. Nonetheless, each element retains its separate identity, and, in this way, the painting relates to the great classical tradition of French still life that stretched from Chardin to Cezanne. Indeed, the exquisite subtlety of color and the economy of brush-work make this great still life a painter’s painting.