Nature morte au samovar

On a dark tabletop before a warm reddish-brown ground stand a gleaming metal samovar with gold highlights, a small white cup on its saucer, a slender dark bottle and a pale, richly decorated teapot, with a white cloth spread beside them. Painted between 1866 and 1872 in Fantin-Latour’s signature velvety impasto — the rough, expressive brushwork that made his still lifes, painted for the English market that sustained him, among the most quietly assured of the nineteenth century — this intimate study shows the artist at his most painterly, coaxing light from the dark ground and the metal’s glow. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.