Tannhäuser

Henri Fantin-Latour's Tannhäuser (1886) is one of his many paintings inspired by Wagner's operas — the French painter's deep love of Wagner's music found repeated expression in large-format canvases depicting scenes and characters from the Ring cycle, Parsifal, Tannhäuser, and other operas. Tannhäuser, the opera about a medieval German knight torn between sacred and profane love — between Elizabeth's purity and Venus's sensual paradise — offered Fantin-Latour rich material for his Symbolist imagination. His Wagnerian paintings are among the most sustained visual interpretations of musical drama in nineteenth-century art.

Fantin-Latour renders the Tannhäuser subject with the soft, atmospheric Symbolist quality that distinguished his imaginary compositions from his precise still life work. His palette for Wagnerian subjects tends toward dreamlike tones — muted roses, greys, the specific colors of staged drama filtered through imagination. Figures are rendered with formal dignity but within an atmospheric context that softens edges and merges forms with their surrounds. The handling achieves the quality of vivid dream or imagined musical experience.