Frontispiece: Truth
Medium
Lithograph in black with scraping on stone on cream laid paper
Dimensions
Image: 45.7 × 32.2 cm (18 × 12 11/16 in.); Sheet: 69.5 × 52.4 cm (27 3/8 × 20 11/16 in.)
Classification
lithograph
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
44047
Art Historical Context
Henri Fantin-Latour's *Frontispiece: Truth (1885) is a striking lithograph created as an illustrative frontispiece, the decorative image typically facing a book's title page. The French artist, renowned for his meticulous portraits and still lifes during the late 19th, bridges Realism and Symbolism in his prints. This work, housed in the Art Institute of Chicago's Prints Drawings department, captures the era's fascination with allegory, using "Truth" as a potent emblem amid shifting artistic and philosophical currents in fin-de-siècle Europe. Executed in black ink with scraping on lithographi...
About the Artist
Henri Fantin-Latour · 1836–1904
Ignace Henri Jean Théodore Fantin-Latour was born on January 14, 1836, in Grenoble, France, to portrait painter Théodore Fantin-Latour, who gave him his earliest drawing lessons. The family relocated to Paris in 1841, where in 1850, at age 14, he enrolled in the École de Dessin, studying under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, whose innovative memory-based method of drawing from observation profoundly ...