Henri Fantin-Latour - La Lecture (Miss Marie Fantin, the painter's sister)

The intense inner life of this reader rendered in a harmony of dark tones is reinforced by the extraordinary chiaroscuro highlighting her face, her hands and the focus of her attention. La Lecture (Reading), exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1863, was one of the first works in which Fantin-Latour established himself as an exceptional portraitist who eschewed the typical mundanities of the genre. The artist chose familiar figures as his models, including his two sisters, Marie and Nathalie, portrayed while engaging in peaceful everyday activities. Despite the ties that bound them, he painted them in an impersonal and austere light, opting for a limited range of colours. In this calm, melancholy atmosphere, Fantin-Latour focused on portraying busy or preoccupied souls. As the famous art historian Henri Focillon remarked in 1928, "he silences the background noise of life around them ; he envelops them in a meditative greyness, he wants a sort of quiet music to emanate from people, in their ordinary habits, wearing their everyday clothes, which cannot be defined in feelings or ideas, still less in phrases, but which is the resonance of their humanity".