Henri Fantin-Latour’s Panier de Raisins evokes the abundance of midsummer and an atmosphere of unhurried pleasure and respite. Every June from 1878 onwards, once the clamour of the Paris Salon had subsided, Fantin-Latour and his wife Victoria (née Dubourg) closed their city apartment and headed to rural France, and a small country house in Lower Normandy, to paint until summer’s end. Henri Fantin-Latour sent the best of his new still-life paintings to his dealer in London, where they found a ready audience.Fantin-Latour produced over 800 fruit and flower paintings between 1862 and 1896, nearly all of which sold in England – the paintings for which he is most highly regarded were unknown to his countrymen. As the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche protested in 1919, “For too long, they were not found in France; Fantin was revealed to us only through rare portraits and fantasies.”
(Persistent encounters, March 2020)