Homage to Delacroix
Henri Fantin-Latour , 1864
160 × 250 cm
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay , Paris
Hommage à Delacroix is a group portrait by Henri Fantin-Latour from 1864 . The painting is 160 × 250 cm and hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris .
Fantin-Latour's oeuvre consists mainly of still lifes . In addition to a few individual portraits, several group portraits stand out from this series. Of these, Hommage à Delacroix is the artist's first group portrait. Fantin-Latour, who was connected to realism and worked with Gustave Courbet for two years , wanted to paint a picture of homage to the painter of the painting Freedom leads the people . He began his first studies for the painting shortly after the death of Eugène Delacroix in August 1863. A group of admirers is always gathered here in front of the bust of Delacroix. The bust is partly surrounded by a mourning female figure and an angel with a laurel wreath.
In the completed painting, however, Fantin-Latour renounces the depiction of a Delacroix bust and depicts the deceased painter by means of a painting. This picture in the picture goes back less to a self-portrait by Delacroix from 1837, but shows clear parallels with a photograph by Nadar . In comparison to the studies, Delacroix has moved to the center of the picture and the admirers around him no longer turn to the depiction of Delacroix, but instead, with one exception, all look at the viewer. Only the art critic Édmond Duranty , sitting on the left edge of the picture, looks like Delacroix to the right edge of the picture. Sitting next to Duranty, the painter Fantin-Latour depicted himself. Unlike the other sitters, he is not wearing a suit, but has portrayed himself as the painter of the Delacroix picture in an open shirt and with a palette in his right hand. This depiction resembles Fantin-Latour's self-portrait from 1859. On the right, in front of the picture by Delacroix, sits the writer Jules Champfleury and next to him his colleague Charles Baudelaire . The people standing are from left to right the painters Louis Cordier (1823-1906), Alphonse Legros , James McNeill Whistler , Édouard Manet , Félix Bracquemond and Albert de Balleroy .
The Hommage à Delacroix was followed by other group portraits: Un atelier aux Batignolles was created in 1870 , in which Fantin-Latour focused on Édouard Manet, and in 1872 he portrayed contemporary writers and poets in Le Coin de table . In addition, Fantin-Latour tried an oil study entitled Hommage à Berlioz ( Rijksmuseum Amsterdam ) on a group portrait dedicated to music. Here he draws on the studies originally made for Hommage à Delacroix and places a bust of the musician Hector Berlioz in the center of the picture. In the painting Autour du piano from 1885, Fantin-Latour gathers a group of musicians around a piano.
Henri Fantin-Latour:
Homage to Delacroix
Study 1863
Eugène Delacroix:
Self-Portrait
1837
Nadar:
Eugène Delacroix
around 1860
Henri Fantin-Latour:
Self-Portrait
1859
literature
- Douglas Druick, Michel Hoog: Fantin-Latour . Exhibition catalog, Paris 1982, ISBN 2-7118-0208-6 .
- Bridget Alsdorf: Fellow Men - Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting . Princeton University Press, Princeton 2013. ISBN 978-0-691-15367-4 .