Roses and Lilies

Painting: Roses and Lilies

Artist: Henri Fantin-Latour

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Size: 23.5x18"

Year: 1888

Fantin-Latour painted more than five hundred floral still lifes over the course of his career. Accounts of the artist's working methods in the mid-1880s reveal that he would paint a piece of cardboard and his canvas the same neutral color. Once the paint had dried, he placed the cardboard behind his floral arrangement in order to have a clear sense of how best to represent shadows and highlights on his canvas.