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As a portraitist, Fantin was peculiarly fortunate. His exquisitely painted flower studies, his pearly-toned beautifully drawn nudes, his lithographs with their soft darks and tender manipulations of line, his ambitious imaginative compositions, are none of them so eloquent of his personality as his portraits with their absolute integrity, their fine divination, and their fluent technique.
It is for such sweet and logical truth-telling, such mild and strict interpretation, that we must pay our debt of appreciation to Fantin, the painter of ideal realities and of actual ideals.
"I know, I know, it's all very well to shake yourself and say you must work. It's easy enough to recall that in 1870 Fantin Latour shut himself up and painted fruit and flowers, and by emulation, buoyed up perhaps by this precedent, you sit down and sketch a still life. What greater joy than to seek out a harmony, find the delicate suave tones, and paint it in an unctuous medium.
Brangwyn, a lady in pink by Mr. Lavery, and a fisherman by Mr. Cayley Robinson. A number of Whistler's Venetian etchings may also be seen here, and much characteristic work by Mr. Pennell. Here too are the "Burghers of Calais" and the "Thinker" of Rodin, while a nude by Fantin Latour should be sought for.
At the Salon of 1859 he and Whistler both submitted subjects drawn from family life, Whistler his At the Piano with his own sister and his niece, little Annie Haden, for the models, and Fantin his painting of young women embroidering and reading, only to have their canvases refused. Fantin was not, however, a martyr to his predilections in art.
Among the moderns, Corot's portrait of himself is one of the most memorable, but Fantin Latour, Flandrin, Leon Bonnat, and Lenbach are all strong and modest; which one cannot say of our own Leighton. Among the later English heads Orchardson's is notable, but Mr. Sargent's is disappointing.
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