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Portrait of Whistler
Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904)
1865
- Medium
- Oil on canvas mounted on aluminum panel
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- H x W: 46.8 x 36.6 cm (18 7/16 x 14 7/16 in)
- Culture
- Americans
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Asian Art
- Credit line
- Gift of Charles Lang Freer
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
Whistler’s good friend Henri Fantin-Latour originally included this portrait as part of a large composition called Le toast: Hommage à la Verité (The Toast: Homage to Truth) that also depicted such avant-garde figures as the painter Edouard Manet and the poet Charles Baudelaire. The Frenchmen wore conventional black suits in the group portrait. Whistler, however, insisted on distinguishing himself by wearing a colorful Chinese robe. Fantin’s group portrait and Whistler’s painting The Princess from the Land of Porcelain were exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1865. Critics ridiculed Fantin’s work, and he later destroyed it, leaving only this fragment of Whistler.
