Henri Fantin-Latour - L'Étude Portrait de Miss Sarah Budget

Sarah Elizabeth Budgett, the daughter of a wealthy English merchant, studied painting at Fantin-Latour's studio. In a kind of mise en abîme of his own practice, the painter depicts the student-turned-model on the verge of painting a bouquet of daffodils on a virgin canvas.  From the 1880s onwards, thanks to the success of his still life paintings, Fantin-Latour could afford to abandon commissioned portraits and devote himself to this type of "naturalistic study" or "fantasy figure". Most of his subjects were close friends or family members, captured in moments of intimate reverie. A metaphor for meditation and inspiration, this curious portrait reveals "the delightful work of artistic conception", "the artist's intellectual restlessness, [...] the thoughtful elaboration of a work in preparation". The writer Huysmans remarked on the "exquisite tenderness of tone" and “unrivalled honesty” that distinguished Fantin-Latour from the conventional portraitists of his time. Incidentally, the following year, the painter struggled to paint a more conventional portrait that the girl's father had commissioned : "Miss, when the study is in a public collection, the portrait will be in an attic," he is said to have told her. (Bibl. Laure Dalon, Fantin-Latour, A fleur de peau, Paris, Musée du Luxembourg, 2016).