Interpretive Resource

Although Henri Fantin-Latour produced many portraits and subject pictures, the bulk of his output consists of still lifes, most of them flower pieces. The Art Institute’s example is characteristic of Fantin in its meticulous draftsmanship and restrained handling, but its large size and formal audacity reflect his briefly held ambition to create still lifes expressly for the Salon, where he hoped to attract a French clientele. However, England remained the primary market for such works.

Fantin here reconfigured select still-life elements from A Corner of the Table, (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), a group portrait of eight young poets he had painted the previous year, into an essay in refined decorative effects. A stark contrast between the dark walls and white tablecloth functions as the composition’s organizing principle. Perhaps influenced by Edouard Manet’s elimination of halftones, this strategy also reflects Fantin’s fascination with the simplifications of Japanese woodblock prints. The rhododendron at the lower right, eccentrically cropped in the best Japanese manner, is silhouetted against the tablecloth to showcase the intricate pattern of its foliage; its purple blossoms sound delicate color chords with the yellow and orange fruits and maroon wine above. The silver, crystal, and porcelain objects are almost evenly distributed over the tabletop, another studiously artificial gesture. Below them is the superb linen tablecloth, its glistening threads rendered with discreet mastery.

Even more than Manet or Japanese prints, this work is redolent of English Aestheticism and its emphasis on rarefied formal effects. In particular Fantin’s unorthodox use of a broad, white Weld was probably influenced by the "symphonies" in white by his friend the American expatriate painter James McNeill Whistler. Still Life: Corner of a Table thus reveals Fantin’s divided aesthetic allegiances. Reconciling his commitment to visual "truth" with a more abstract, "musical" approach influenced by poet Charles Baudelaire and composer Richard Wagner (whose operas the artist represented many times), Fantin here produced a singular work that fuses the Realist and proto-Symbolist aspects of his art.