La Toilette

Nobody posed for this garden scene. Fantin-Latour called pictures like it projets d'imagination, subjects he invented, and he made them alongside the portraits and flower pieces that paid his way. From 1887 the Paris dealer Gustave Tempelaere handled his work, and the arrangement left him free to paint such fantasies as he pleased. By the 1890s everything he sent to the Salon was of this kind.

A young woman in a white gown sits while one attendant dresses her hair, a second sits beside her in black and gold, and a third comes forward with a tray. The brushwork is soft and loose, and the figures are only lightly set down against the dark trees. The museum gives the canvas no date, and the signature, simply Fantin, is at the lower left. Tempelaere had it first, at his gallery on the rue Laffitte in Paris. In 1907 the Boston collector Robert J. Edwards bought it from a New York dealer, and after his death it came to the museum in 1925, in the collection named for his mother, Juliana Cheney Edwards.