The Wedding Feast at Cana (after Paolo Veronese)

This 1867 copy after Paolo Veronese's monumental Wedding Feast at Cana — the original hanging in the Louvre since Napoleon brought it from Venice — demonstrates the central role that copying played in nineteenth-century artistic training and practice. Fantin-Latour was an assiduous student of the Old Masters and made many copies in the Louvre, considering direct engagement with past painting a more rigorous education than academic instruction. Veronese's vast canvas, over ten meters wide, was one of the most admired works in the Louvre for its management of crowd, color, and architectural setting, and copying it was a significant undertaking. Fantin-Latour's version, now at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, reflects his genuine admiration for Venetian color and his interest in the spatial organization of large figure compositions. The exercise also had practical dimension: copies after celebrated originals could be sold to collectors who wanted a record of a famous work or a teaching aid. The Ulster Museum's collection of nineteenth-century European art provides an appropriate home for this scholarly, carefully executed work.

Oil on canvas translating Veronese's warm Venetian palette — golden light, white tablecloths, luxuriant fabrics in crimson and blue — into Fantin-Latour's own handling. The scale of the copy relative to the original determines how much detail can be preserved; at reduced scale, figures necessarily become more summary while architectural elements remain legible.