Specialising in still life piled high with dead game, his paintings may now seem horrific. They so inspired Goethe that he dedicated a poem to them.
still life
To see his art, look not at Fantin’s groups of human figures, but at these crowds of flowers and fruit.
He seems to have painted continuously up to his death in 1904, but paintings quite unlike before. And why his huge collection of photos of nude models?
His last large group portrait features eight men who gathered to enjoy the music of Wagner. Why are they all looking in different directions, though?
Perhaps it was a mistake to include Arthur Rimbaud and his lover Paul Verlaine in this group portrait. Rimbaud had just wounded a friend with a sword in a fight after dinner.
A group portrait which failed so badly that he cut it up after it was shown at the Salon, a portrait of Manet, and another group portrait which inspired Impressionists.
Not an Impressionist by any means, he was a close friend of Whistler and Manet, who painted some of the major group portraits of the late 1800s.
One of the finest still-life painters of any age, some of her work celebrated the sensual pleasures of food, others the futility of life.
Into the 20th century, and he was busy teaching at Summer Schools in Europe, and trying to come to terms with art of the future.
Why did he paint so many still lifes? And why did so many of them feature fresh fish?
