Still Life with Pansies

Still Life with Pansies, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of Fantin-Latour's more intimate flower studies, dated to around 1874. The pansy — a flower associated in Victorian symbolism with thought (pensée in French) — was a frequent subject in his smaller floral works, and its velvety dark-centred blooms offered a specific representational challenge different from the looser, more flowing roses and peonies of his larger compositions. The Metropolitan's collection of Fantin-Latour's work represents the strong American interest in his painting that developed in the late nineteenth century.

Fantin-Latour renders the pansies with precision appropriate to their specific character — the dark central markings, the smooth oval petals — distinguishing them clearly from the looser handling he applied to more abundant flower arrangements. The composition is spare by his standards, the pansies given space to read as individual botanical presences rather than elements of a dense chromatic mass.