Dawn

Henri Fantin-Latour's 'Dawn' (1888) belongs to his allegorical subjects inspired by music — alongside his Wagner and Berlioz illustrations, he produced images of the natural and mythological world that drew on the atmospheric quality of musical experience. Dawn as subject allowed him to combine the female figure (typically personifications of natural phenomena in nineteenth-century allegorical painting) with the specific quality of early morning light that was the subject's defining visual characteristic. His allegorical subjects were executed as lithographs as well as paintings, reaching a wide audience through print.

Fantin-Latour renders the dawn subject with the soft, misty atmospheric quality appropriate to the liminal moment between night and day. His characteristic sfumato-like approach to the female figure integrates the personification of dawn with the atmospheric conditions of the moment she represents — the figure dissolving into the same luminous grey-pink haze of early morning light. The palette is the specific range of the pre-sunrise sky.