Fellow men: Fantin-Latour and the problem of the group in nineteenth-century French painting

Abstract

Near the end of her new study on the group portraits of Henri Fantin-Latour, Bridget Alsdorf notes: “The history of nineteenth-century French art is a field fascinated by movements and collective politics, yet still dominated by accounts of singular artists and oeuvres. Although we depend on groups to give structure to history, as artists depended on them to provide camaraderie and support, it has proved difficult to imagine the artistic self as formed fundamentally by way of others” (227). Her book Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting goes a long way toward rectifying this scholarly imbalance. As her subtitle indicates, Alsdorf treats the group as a problem in more than one sense: she approaches it both from the perspective of representation, through a series of close readings of multi-figure portraits by Fantin and his contemporaries, and as a social, and indeed gender, issue relating to the dynamics of male interaction in the mid-nineteenth century. At the heart of her argument is a meditation on the necessary tensions generated by the conflicting pressures of mutuality and individualism—by the opposing needs for progressive artists to assert a group identity in the face of an indifferent or hostile public while at the same time cultivating the distinct creative personality increasingly demanded in the cultural marketplace. Alsdorf reveals traces of these tensions in the visual structures of the works she so persuasively explores, and gestures toward a broader analysis of their centrality in shaping individuals and groups within the artistic community, and among bourgeois males of the period more generally.