Still Life: Corner of a Table

Henri Fantin-Latour built his reputation in the 1860s on flower pieces painted for the English market, but in the large still lifes of the following decade he gave the genre a new monumentality. This canvas of 1873 shows the corner of a table spread with a porcelain bowl, a wine glass, fruit and a silver spoon, painted with the firm, enamel-like handling and the quiet tonal harmonies that made him the most admired still-life painter of his generation in France. Where the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century had packed their tables with abundance, Fantin-Latour’s arrangement is spare and intimate, a meditation on the play of light across simple forms that links his art to the classical tradition of Chardin. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.