Painting music

The third member of James McNeill Whistler’s coterie to spark my interest was Ignace-Henri-Jean-Théodore Fantin-Latour, called ‘Fantin’ by his friends. Fantin (1836-1904) was a painter, printmaker and illustrator who is best known for his floral still lifes and portraits of his contemporaries in the fields of art and literature.

Born in Grenoble, Fantin was initially taught painting by his father who was a well-regarded portrait painter. He later briefly attended the École des Beaux-Arts and the school of Lecoq de Boisbaudran. However, Fantin’s technique was refined through working in Gustave Courbet’s studio and assiduously making copies of Old Master paintings he studied in the Louvre.

Fantin was a shy, reclusive, socially awkward individual who nevertheless had many friends among the leading French and English painters of the day including: Delacroix, Ingres, Corot, Manet, Millais and Whistler. In 1861, Whistler introduced Fantin to the English collectors Edwin and Ruth Edwards who were particularly appreciative of floral still lifes. They became extremely important in encouraging and popularising Fantin’s flower paintings in England – which led to them being acquired by public galleries in Australia in the 19^th century.

The National Gallery of Victoria purchased the still life Marigolds (1891) in 1892 from the Royal Anglo-Australian Exhibition held in Melbourne. An earlier work Dahlias (1866) was acquired in 1906 by the Felton Bequest. As Ann Elias notes in her essay ‘Fantin-Latour in Australia’ (2009): Dahlias is similar to a Fantin-Latour painting of the same title and subject, dated 1877, in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In both paintings the flowers, presented without a vase, are set against a deep, rich background, with the head of each flower individuated as if a portrait. These paintings call to mind Jacques-Emile Blanche’s comment that “Fantin studied each flower, its grain, its tissue, as if it were a human face.”

Elias’ essay is fascinating and discusses the popularity of Fantin with Australian audiences, as well as the influence he had on local artists including Hans Heysen, George Lambert and Arthur Streeton. The essay can be found at: https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn09/fantin-latour-in-australia

However, there is less known about Fantin’s other passion. In 1885, he exhibited his painting Around the Piano at the Paris Salon, marking his allegiance to the phenomenon known as ‘Wagnerism’. Although it had been gaining momentum since the early 1860s, this curious aesthetic and political adherence to Wagner’s creativity peaked in Paris over the next three years.

Wagner revolutionised the way people understood and attended to music. Prior to Wagner, operas were structured musical dramas with arias interspersed by recitative.  Wagner changed this by erasing the borders between the musical ‘events’, establishing the work as a continuously sung unified whole. Further, Wagner introduced the idea of the darkened auditorium in his purpose-built festival theatre in Bayreuth. Previously, people went to the opera to socialise, to observe and to be observed. Wagner’s use of the darkened auditorium ensured that the audience concentrated on the performance which radically altered the way in which people attended to his music. This changed the habits of the listening public forever.

In Around the Piano we see a group of musicians – all professed Wagnerians – listening to Wagner’s music. However, Fantin was not the only artist to depict Wagnerism. In Aubrey Beardsley’s drawing The Wagnerites (1894), we see a different type of Wagnerian listener – young women tuning into the opera ‘Tristan and Isolde’. And in Paul Cezanne’s Overture to Tannhäuser (1869) we have a more intimate picture – this time of the artist’s mother and sister. While Cezanne’s mother sews, his sister is perhaps immersed in the dreams of a romantic life stimulated by the music.

The staging of Tannhäuser in Paris in 1861 was an artistic debacle which consolidated Wagner’s position among his aficionados. Keen to make a name for himself in France after his exile from Germany, Wagner re-worked his 1845 opera to include a ballet as required by the Paris venue. Rather than inserting the ballet in act II (as was traditionally the case in Paris), Wagner placed it in act I as a bacchanale where it would make dramatic sense by representing the sensual world of Venus. This, among other changes, provoked significant audience mockery and cat-calling. Despite extensive preparation (there were 164 rehearsals), Wagner withdrew the opera after its third performance.

Tannhäuser became the subject of Edouard Manet’s painting Music in the Tuileries (1862). Here we see a group portrait of many cultural identities of the 19^th century (including Manet, Baudelaire and Fantin) which Manet has structured according to Wagnerian principles through his use of the pictorial space. The crowd of people is pushing through attempting to overcome the borders imposed by the trees. The only figure who is not involved in the process of pushing is the French composer, Jacques Offenbach, depicted on the right with his back to the crowd. Offenbach was not a Wagnerian and stood apart from his contemporaries in the musical world of the day.

Fantin loved music and, even though he did not play, he had immersed himself in music from his mid-teens. He regularly attended music recitals in Manet’s salon and listened to Whistler’s sister play the piano. But it was the works of the German composers – Brahms, Schumann and Wagner – that he adored.

In 1860 aged 24, Fantin attended one of Wagner’s early concerts in Paris which was conducted by the composer himself. The following year, he was bitterly disappointed when he missed out on seeing Tannhäuser as the season of the opera was cut short by the controversy. This resulted in his first Wagner pictures– Tannhäuser on the Venusberg – in 1862 and 1864.

While working on his ideas for Wagner’s Venusberg, Fantin remembered reading the ‘Life of Robert Schumann’ while sitting in the Louvre and reflecting on the art of the Venetian painters who he considered blended art and music. References to Giorgione’s/Titian’s The Pastoral Concert (c.1508) are clear in Fantin’s painting and lithograph.

Fantin became obsessed with depicting Wagnerian subjects. Episodes from The Ring Cycle – The Evocation of Erda (from Siegfried) in 1876 and Finale of Rheingold in 1877 – were made shortly after it was first performed in Bayreuth. As well as the ‘Piano’ painting, there were two lithographs of Wagnerian subjects in 1885. The following year, another 14 lithographs; a painting based on Tannhäuser; and a pastel of Siegfried and the Rheinmaidens. Then in 1887 the Salon was graced with three more lithographs and a large painting of Das Rheingold: Opening Scene. Audiences and critics marvelled at the ‘musicality’ of Fantin’s images and increasingly called him ‘the painter who made music visible’. Some went so far as to describe Fantin as a synaesthete.

The Romanticism echoed in Wagner’s music, coupled with its striking modernity and ability to express thoughts and emotions in abstract terms, appealed to Fantin who was searching for a way to capture this in his art. Describing his feelings in a letter, Fantin wrote: ‘Oh, what great happiness Music gives me … how wonderful it is to create works that can move men so, can express one’s thoughts, one’s highest ideal, that can say what cannot be said in words’.

Fantin’s friend and supporter, Edwin Edwards, understood the artist’s need to infuse his art with the effects of music. Commenting on a still life of flowers, Edwards wrote to Fantin: ‘each painting is a symphony, in which the tones are so skilfully transposed that each object is in its true relation … being – as a musician would say – in two different keys’.

Fantin’s commitment to expressing his enjoyment of music is demonstrated in the many works that he created which were inspired by music. However, as Edwards points out, knowing Fantin’s passion, it is now impossible not to hear the lilt of the flowers when looking at his other works.