Ignace-Henri-Théodore Fantin-Latour, 'A Plate of Apples', 1861

After classical training, Henri Fantin-Latour spent a short time studying at Gustave Courbet’s School of Realism in Paris. He is unlikely to have come across still-life painting there, since Courbet did not take up the genre until much later in life. However, he would have absorbed Courbet’s ideas about Realism: truth to the world around him and truth to the subject, using rough, impressionistic brushwork.

In 1861, not long after he left Courbet’s studio, Fantin-Latour was introduced to Mr and Mrs Edwin Edwards. He visited them at their villa in Sunbury near London. Matthew White Ridley and Thomas Armstrong, two artist friends of Fantin-Latour, were also staying with them at the time. The three artists studied still-life painting, in which interest was growing. Ridley and Armstrong were already aware of this interest as part of a new style that became known as the Aesthetic Movement. This movement championed pure beauty and the visual and sensual qualities of art ‘for their own sake’.

Fantin-Latour’s rough-skinned apples with their awkward shapes and blemishes owe their palpable texture to Courbet’s teaching. Although the dish also bears the marks of the brush, it is less impressionistic, a delicate piece of porcelain with a deep blue and gold border. These were favourite colours of the artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler, one of the founders of the new movement. He was also a close friend of Fantin-Latour and the Edwards. The fruits are placed on the dish like specimens. They form a square within its circle, with space between them. Each one is at a different angle to display the structure of an apple: two sit upright on the surface, and two are tilted against the raised rim. The colours show various stages of ripeness, or perhaps different varieties of apple.

The front of the table shows colour, weight and texture. Beyond that there is little differentiation between the tabletop and the wall. This is a precursor of the plain, often dark backgrounds in many of Fantin-Latour’s later flower paintings, such as Roses (Tate, London) and The Rosy Wealth of June (National Gallery, London). There is the suggestion of a chair back catching the light on the right. Other faint glimmers might be polished furniture along the wall. That is all.

Fantin-Latour’s apples were painted in a comfortable, bourgeois house in peacetime. Much later, during a turbulent time in Paris and when Courbet was in jail for insurrection, he painted Still Life with Apples and a Pomegranate (National Gallery, London). Courbet’s background is dark and his apples are piled up on an earthenware plate, glowing as if from firelight. They invoke a place, a mood, a memory. They seem redolent of the smell of autumn. Fantin-Latour described the colour, form, weight and texture of his apples and dish exactly as they were. They are aesthetically pleasing, perhaps evoking a slight scent, but have no meaning, narrative or emotion. Without each artist’s knowledge, the two pictures point to the difference between the old Realism and the coming Aesthetic Movement.