Henri Fantin-Latour

Henri Fantin-Latour painted the group photographs of the French art world before photography took that job. He gathered the rebels and geniuses of his day into large, sober group portraits, among them Homage to Delacroix and A Studio at Les Batignolles, in which the young Manet sits at his easel surrounded by admirers, a watchful Monet and Renoir among them. These calm, dark canvases are now our clearest picture of who stood with whom as modern art was being born.

Yet Fantin-Latour himself kept out of the fight. He showed at the official Salon, avoided the Impressionist exhibitions, and made his steady living from something quieter: flowers. His still lifes of roses and other blooms, plainly and lovingly painted, were especially prized by English collectors and kept him solvent for life.

There was a dreaming side to him too. A devotee of the music of Wagner and Berlioz, he made moody lithographs of scenes drawn from their operas. He died near Paris in 1904, best known abroad for the roses and at home for the faces of a generation.