Grapes glisten and
peaches emit a velvet glow beside a vase of rocket stalks in bloom. Henri
Fantin-Latour was the most successful and prolific still life painter in
nineteenth-century France, celebrated for quietly sumptuous arrangements of
fruit and flowers. He himself preferred to paint portraits—and, indeed, scenes
from the contemporary operas of Richard Wagner—but the commercial success of
his still lifes bound him to this genre, into which he introduced a new ethos
of Realism. This devotion to painting what he saw reflected the circles in
which Fantin travelled as a close friend of Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and
Edgar Degas.