Portrait of Madame Léon Maître (Portrait de Madame Léon Maître)

Brooklyn Museum photograph
Object Label
Henri Fantin-Latour imbued his sitter—the sister-in-law of a friend—with an air of introspective melancholy, and the delicately rendered jewelry, fan, and corsage reveal his talent for still life. While working on this portrait, the artist likely saw A Bar at the Folies-Bergère in the studio of his longtime friend Édouard Manet. Madame Maître’s black, lace-trimmed evening dress, her choker, and the flowers at her décolletage are similar to the barmaid’s. Both paintings were displayed at the 1882 Paris Salon, but whereas Manet’s ambiguous scene of a lower-class woman at work caused a public sensation, critics praised Fantin-Latour’s more sedate portraits, such as this one, as exemplars of femininity and breeding: “No one expresses like Monsieur Fantin-Latour the freshness of flowers and the natural gentleness of women of good solid bourgeois stock.”
Caption
Henri Fantin-Latour French, 1836–1904. Portrait of Madame Léon Maître (Portrait de Madame Léon Maître), 1882. Oil on canvas, 50 × 55 1/8 in., 122 lb. (127 × 140 cm, 55.34kg) frame: 62 x 67 1/4 x 4 1/4 in. (157.5 x 170.8 x 10.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of A. Augustus Healy and George A. Hearn, 06.69. No known copyright restrictions (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 06.69_PS9.jpg)
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Artist
Title
Portrait of Madame Léon Maître (Portrait de Madame Léon Maître)
Date
1882
Geography
Place made: France
Medium
Oil on canvas
Classification
Dimensions
50 × 55 1/8 in., 122 lb. (127 × 140 cm, 55.34kg) frame: 62 x 67 1/4 x 4 1/4 in. (157.5 x 170.8 x 10.8 cm)
Signatures
Signed and dated upper right: "Fantin. 82"
Credit Line
Gift of A. Augustus Healy and George A. Hearn
Accession Number
06.69
Rights
No known copyright restrictions
This work may be in the public domain in the United States. Works created by United States and non-United States nationals published prior to 1923 are in the public domain, subject to the terms of any applicable treaty or agreement. You may download and use Brooklyn Museum images of this work. Please include caption information from this page and credit the Brooklyn Museum. If you need a high resolution file, please fill out our online application form (charges apply). The Museum does not warrant that the use of this work will not infringe on the rights of third parties, such as artists or artists' heirs holding the rights to the work. It is your responsibility to determine and satisfy copyright or other use restrictions before copying, transmitting, or making other use of protected items beyond that allowed by "fair use," as such term is understood under the United States Copyright Act. The Brooklyn Museum makes no representations or warranties with respect to the application or terms of any international agreement governing copyright protection in the United States for works created by foreign nationals. For further information about copyright, we recommend resources at the United States Library of Congress, Cornell University, Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums, and Copyright Watch. For more information about the Museum's rights project, including how rights types are assigned, please see our blog posts on copyright. If you have any information regarding this work and rights to it, please contact copyright@brooklynmuseum.org.
Frequent Art Questions
Can you tell me who painted this?
The painter is Henri Fantin-Latour, a French painter from the late-19th century. He trained for a time with the radical Realist painter Gustave Courbet and was a friend of many avant-garde artists of the period like James McNeill Whistler, Edouard Manet, and many of the Impressionists. Like his friends, Fantin-Latour had a taste for modern life and contemporary scenes, but he was not attracted to plein-air (or out doors) painting. His interior scenes and portraits, like this one, have a pensive intimacy. He was very well known for his paintings of flower bouquets and you can see his skill in the lace and corsage depicted on Madame Léon Maître's dress in this painting. Later in career, beginning in the 1870s, he turned to allegorical, mythological and literary subjects, typical of a trend in modern painting called Symbolism.Thanks!Could you give me some information?
The subject of this painting is the sister-in-law of a friend of the artist, Henri Fantin-Latour. She was the wife of a businessman Leon Maitre. Fantin-Latour painted her three times. LaTour prefered painting quiet scenes of men and women he knew well. Like Madame Maitre, they often seem absorbed in their own interior world, a new development in society portraiture.Surprisingly, considering how beautiful and mysterious this portrait is, the artist is best known for paintings of flowers and group portraits, not portraits of a single subject.
Have information?
Have information about an artwork? Contact us at