Still life (primroses, pears and pomegranates)

By 1866 Henri Fantin-Latour had spent a little time in the studio of Gustave Courbet, the great realist, learning to set down plainly whatever sat in front of him. Here that is a modest tabletop: pale primroses, two pears and a couple of split pomegranates on a white cloth, lifted out of a dark, almost black ground. He treated pictures like this as bread and butter, work he could sell while he gave his heart to portraits and to subjects drawn from music. Even so, he took the colour seriously, wanting his canvases to work like music, warm tones set glowing against the shadow so a red seed or a yellow pear carries real weight. He was 30 that year, and paintings like this one, made to sell, were already finding their steadiest buyers among collectors across the Channel in England.