Roses 'La France'

"Roses 'La France'" from 1895, held at Glasgow Museums Resource Centre, takes its subtitle from one of the most celebrated rose varieties of the nineteenth century. La France, introduced in 1867, was the first hybrid tea rose — a new class combining the recurrent blooming of tea roses with the vigor of hybrid perpetuals — and its large, high-centered blooms in silvery pink quickly became enormously fashionable. That Fantin-Latour chose to identify this specific variety by name reflects both his botanical precision and the cultural currency of named rose varieties in the gardening culture he and his collectors shared. The 1895 date places the painting in his final decade, when his flower-painting technique had achieved its most relaxed and economical form. Glasgow's civic art collections, built through the city's nineteenth-century commercial prosperity, hold a notable group of Fantin-Latour works acquired during his lifetime and in the years immediately after, reflecting Scottish collectors' early appreciation of his art.

Oil on canvas with attention to the specific qualities of the La France rose: its large, high-centered form, the silvery pink of its petals, and the reflexed outer petals that give hybrid tea roses their characteristic sculptural quality. Fantin-Latour rendered these qualities through careful tonal gradation from deep pink at the center to paler outer petals.