Roses in a Glass Vase

Fantin-Latour signed this canvas Fantin 90 at the lower right, and it went first to London, to Elizabeth Edwards, who with her late husband Edwin had been his friend and his agent in England for many years. The Museum of Fine Arts draws attention to how it is made. The background is rough and scumbled, dragged on thinly, and against it the overblown blossoms look soft and heavy, almost like flesh. By 1906 the picture was in Paris with Ferdinand Dreyfus, a lawyer and politician who later sat in the French Senate, and he lent it to a Fantin-Latour exhibition that year. It passed to his son Jean. In 1942, under the German occupation, a Fantin painting of roses in a glass was confiscated from Jean Ferdinand-Dreyfus's home, and in 1947 it still appeared, with no measurements or photograph, on the French list of works not yet returned. The museum thinks this is probably that painting, recovered by the family some time after the war, since his heir sold it in January 1962, soon after Jean's death. From there it moved through dealers and sales in Paris and London, and Alice Hay of New York bought it at Christie's in 1974. She left it to the museum in 1987.