Un coin de table

Fantin-Latour showed this group portrait at the Paris Salon of 1872, and it has become famous almost by accident, for two of the men seated at its left end. The clean-shaven older one is the poet Paul Verlaine. The dreamy boy beside him, chin on his hand, is Arthur Rimbaud, then about 17 and in the middle of the violent affair between them that would end with Verlaine shooting him. Fantin had first meant the picture as a tribute to the dead poet Baudelaire, but that plan fell apart. One invited writer, Albert Mérat, refused to be shown in the same frame as Rimbaud, whose behaviour had scandalised the group, so where Mérat should have sat Fantin painted a vase of flowers instead.