L’Aurore 1901

Henri Fantin-Latour painted this dreamy scene, L’Aurore, using oil on canvas, and the way he handled the paint feels almost like a memory. See how the colors blend and fade into each other? It’s like he’s capturing not just a visual scene, but a fleeting moment, a feeling. I love how the red fabric draped around the figure pops against the muted blues and yellows, it is such a simple and effective compositional trick. If you look closely, you can see these tiny brushstrokes, especially in the clouds, building up this luminous atmosphere, but the surface remains relatively flat. This creates a strange push-pull effect, as the painting has a real sense of depth, and yet it is so obviously paint pushed around on a flat surface. Fantin-Latour reminds me a little of Odilon Redon, in the sense that he treats the canvas as a space for quiet reflection, as though the act of painting itself is more important than the subject represented. For me, the painting becomes a space of reverie and contemplation.