Fantin-Latour was born in 1836, was the son of a painter, and was educated at Paris under his father's guidance and that of Lecoq and Boisbaudeau, professor at a little art school connected with the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. One of the most interesting painters of the little group in France whose work began to come before the public about the middle of the nineteenth century, a close friend of Whistler, a passionate admirer of Delacroix, and an inspired student of the old masters, he managed to preserve intact an individuality that has a singular richness and simplicity seen against the many-colored tapestry of nineteenth-century art. Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Franz Hals, and Nicolaas Maas, Pieter de Hooch and Vermeer of Delft, Watteau and Chardin, Van Dyck, Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese were his true masters and his copies of their works are said by his enlightened critic, M. ArsÈne Alexandre, to have a masterly quality of their own, to be far removed from the conventionality of facsimiles, and to bear upon an underlying fidelity of transcription an impress of individual sentiment. He sought to be faithful to the originals beyond external imitation, by seeking to render the original tone of the painting in its first freshness, as it appeared before time and varnish had yellowed and darkened it. He thus made himself familiar with the technical methods of the great periods of painting, and, coming into his inheritance of modern ideas and ideals, he was able to achieve a beauty of execution much too rarely sought by his contemporaries, although his intimate companions like himself frequented the Louvre with a considerable assiduity, spending upon the old masters the enthusiasm which they withheld from the later academic school of painting.

His earlier subjects were largely Biblical and historical. He then passed to domestic scenes and in 1859, 1861, and 1863 was painting his pictures of Les Liseurs and Les Brodeuses which showed the charming face of his sister with her sensitive smiling mouth and softly modeled brows, and later that of his wife. 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. He early obtained admission to the Salon although he had enough rejected work to permit him to appear among the painters exhibiting in the famous little "Salon des RefusÉs" of 1863. He received medals and official recognitions. But his modesty of taste led him to hold himself somewhat apart and exclusive among those who shared his likings. His portrait of himself, painted in 1858, shows a dreamy young man with serious, almost solemn, eyes, sitting before his easel, and looking into the distance with the expression of one who sees visions.

As a matter of fact he did see visions and attempted to fix them with his art. An ardent lover of music, he was eager to translate the emotions aroused by it into the terms of his own art. As early as 1859 he was in England, to which he returned in 1861 and 1864, and while there he was surrounded by a group of people who shared his enthusiasm for German music. There he first became familiar with Schumann's melodies, and made the rare little etching representing his English friends, Mr. and Mrs. Edwards, playing one of Schumann's compositions, Edwards with his flute and Mrs. Edwards at the piano. In 1862 he had the very tempered satisfaction of finding that Wagner, already beloved by him, had reached the public taste through the labors of the courageous Pasdeloup. "I always regret," he wrote to Edwards, "seeing the objects of my adoration adored by others, especially by the masses. I am very jealous when I love."

In order to celebrate Wagner's triumph over these masses, however, he at once made the lithograph called Venusberg, from which sprang the very different oil version of the same subject which together with the Hommage À Delacroix, the story of which M. BÉnÉdite has recounted, was admitted to the Salon of 1864. Fantin's lithographs, a number of which are in the print room of the Lenox Library building in New York City, show clearly his preoccupation with music, and an interesting article on this phase of his temperament appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, September 15, 1906. Naturally a worshiper, he did not confine himself to commemorating only the musicians who were his favorites. In lithography and painting he exalted such diverse heroes of the different arts as Stendhal, Hugo, Baudelaire, Delacroix, Manet, Schumann, Weber, Berlioz, and Wagner. In 1877 his enthusiasm for Wagner revived in his work, and compositions based on the Ring music followed each other in rapid succession. Wolfram gazing at the evening star, or following with enchanted eyes Elizabeth's ghostly figure as it moves slowly up the hill toward the towers of Wartburg; the Rhine maidens playing with rhythmic motions in the swirling waters, with Alberic, crouched in the foreground, watching them; Sieglinde, giving Siegmund to drink, as hounded and pursued he sinks at the door of Hunding's dwelling; the evocation of Kundry by Klingner; Siegfried blowing his horn and receding from the enticements of the Rhine maidens—these are among the subjects that engaged him. It would be difficult to describe his manner of interpretation. Quite without theatrical suggestion, it combines a dramatic use of dark and light and a feeling for palpable atmosphere hardly equaled by Rembrandt himself, with a remarkably certain touch. Nothing could better emphasize the value of technical drill to a poetic temperament than these imaginative drawings. In them Fantin gives full rein to his emotional delight in tender visions and twilight dreams. The lovely rhythm of his lines, the rise and fall of his sensitive shadows and lights that play and interplay in as strict obedience to law as the waves of the sea, his delicate modeling by which he brings form out of nebulous half-tones with the slightest touches, the least discernible accents, the accurate bland drawing, the ordered composition, the subtle spacing, the innumerable indications of close observation of life—all these qualities combine to give an impression of fantasy and reality so welded and fused as to be indistinguishable to the casual glance.

In spite of the assiduous study of Dutch and Italian masters, Fantin's work is characteristically French in both its fantasy and its realism. Not only the grace of the forms and the elegance of the gestures, but the sentiment of the composition and the quality of the color, are undisguisedly Gallic. He is closer to Watteau than to any other painter but his firmer technic and more patient temperament give him an advantage over the feverish master of eighteenth-century idyls. His art throbs with a fuller life and in his airiest dreams his world is made of a more solid substance. For melancholy he offers serenity, for daintiness he offers delicacy.

His technique, especially in his later work, is quite individual in its character. He models with short swift strokes of the brush—not unlike the brush work in some of Manet's pictures. His pigment is rather dry and often almost crumbly in texture, but his values are so carefully considered that this delicately ruffled surface has the effect of casting a penumbra about the individual forms, of causing them to swim in a thickened but fluent atmosphere, instead of suggesting the rugosity of an ill-managed medium.

In his paintings of flowers he found the best possible expression for his subtle color sense. The letters written to him by Whistler in the sixties show how fervently these paintings were admired by the American master of harmony, and also how much good criticism came to him from his comrade whose enthusiasm for Japanese art already was fully awakened.

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. The portrait which we reproduce is of Madam MaÎtre, was painted in 1882, and was acquired by the Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1906. It represents a woman of middle years with a sincere and thoughtful face and a quiet bearing. The felicities of Fantin's brush are seen in the way in which the silk sleeve follows the curve of the round firm arm, and the soft lace of the bodice rests against the throat and is relieved almost without contrast of color against the white skin. The touches of pure pale blue in the fan and the delicate tints of the rose are manifestations of the artist's restrained and subtle management of color, but above all there is a perfectly unassuming yet uncompromising rendering of character. There is nothing in the plain refined features that cries out for recognition of a temperament astutely divined. They have the calm repose that indicates entire lack of self-consciousness, no quality is unduly insisted upon, there is neither sentimentality nor brutal realism in the handling, the sitter simply lives as naturally upon the canvas as we feel that she must have lived in the world. 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.