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Homage to Delacroix

Henri Fantin-Latour · Realism & Academic

Artist: Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904)
Date: 1864
Dimensions: 160 x 250 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas
Location: Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

Homage to Delacroix shows ten men in dark suits gathered around a framed portrait of the painter Eugène Delacroix, who had died the year before. They stand and sit in a row, solemn and still, as if posing for a group photograph.

A closer look

The men are writers and artists who admired Delacroix and represented the new generation of the avant-garde: among them are the painters Édouard Manet and James McNeill Whistler, the poet Charles Baudelaire, the critic Champfleury and Fantin-Latour himself, in a white shirt holding a palette. The portrait of Delacroix, lit and placed at the centre like an icon, contrasts with the sober black of the group. Fantin-Latour wanted to show that the true heirs of Delacroix were these independent artists, not the official Academy, which had long rejected him.

History of the painting

After the Salon of 1864 the painting passed through the hands of dealers, among them Ernest Gambart and Paul Durand-Ruel, and was later bought by the painter and collector Étienne Moreau-Nélaton. In 1906 he gave his collection to the French state; the painting was shown at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, moved to the Louvre in 1934 and to the Musée d’Orsay in 1986.

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