About the artist:

Henri Fantin-Latour was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers.

After his first Salon submissions were rejected in 1859, he began exhibiting with his friend Édouard Manet and the future Impressionists Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. In 1865, he wrote to Edwin Edwards: “We form a group and make noise because there are many painters and one is easily forgotten. When we come together... we grow in numbers and become more adventurous. I thought it could last, it was my mistake”.

In 1867, he was also one of the nine members of the Japanese Jinglar Society, with Carolus-Duran, who painted his portrait twice in 1861, and the ceramists Bracquemond and Solon, who they met to dinner at the Japanese style. “One always felt when approaching him, a small feeling of fear, because of these rough manners which the artists of his generation often affected as inseparable from a noble independence”, would say Jacques-Émile Blanche, a friend painter of the following generation.

Fantin renovated the collective portraiture with paintings who served as large manifestos: Homage to Delacroix (1864), A Studio at Les Batignolles (1870), a tribute to Manet, The Corner of the Table (1872), a homage to the Parnassian poets, including Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, and Around the Piano (1885), a tribute to musicians and musicologists of his time.

In A Studio at Les Batignolles, Manet is depicted in the center in the act of painting, while he is surrounded of several important painters and writers, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Zacharie Astruc, Emile Zola, Frédéric Bazille and Claude Monet. This canvas testifies to the links he maintained with the artistic and literary avant-garde of the time and to Manet in particular; it also seems to be an echo of Zola's opinion of Manet: "Around the painter reviled by the public, a common front has been created of painters and writers claiming him as a master".

In addition to his realistic paintings, Fantin-Latour created imaginative lithographs inspired by the music of some of the great classical composers. In 1876, Fantin-Latour attended a performance of the Ring cycle at Bayreuth, which he found particularly moving. He would later publish lithographs inspired by Richard Wagner in La revue wagnérienne, which helped solidify his reputation among Paris' avant-garde as an anti-naturalist painter.

In 1876, Fantin-Latour married a fellow painter, Victoria Dubourg. He would spend his summers on the country estate of his wife's family at Buré, Orne in Lower Normandy, where he died on 25 August 1904.

Like many painters of his time, he became interested in photography, taking pictures for his work. He was also a big collector of erotic photographs; his estate lists more than 1,400 which are kept in the Museum of Grenoble.

He was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris, France.