About Henri Fantin-Latour
Ignace Henri Jean Theodore Fantin-Latour (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ʁi fɑ̃tɛ̃ latuʁ]; 14 January 1836 – 25 August 1904) was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers. == Early life == Born in Grenoble, Isère, Ignace Henri Jean Théodore Fantin-Latour first had drawing lessons with his father Théodore Fantin-Latour (1805–1875), who was a painter. In 1850 he moved to Paris where he enrolled in the small Paris School of Drawing, where he studied with Louis-Alexandre Péron and Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, an innovative and non-traditional instructor who developed his own teaching method based on painting and drawing from memory. He entered the École des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, in 1854, where he had for classmates, Edgar Degas, Alphonse Legros and Jean-Charles Cazin. After studying there, he spent long time copying the works of the old masters in the Musée du Louvre. Although Fantin-Latour befriended several of the young artists who would later be associated with Impressionism, including Whistler and Manet, his own work remained conservative in style. In 1861, he briefly frequented the studio of Gustave Courbet. A painting from this period represents him with the painter and caricaturist Oulevay. At the start of his career, between 1854 and 1861, he produced a large number of self-portraits in chalk, charcoal and oil. He had one of them refused at the Salon of 1859.
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