Henri Fantin-Latour grew up in Paris where he studied painting with his father and later worked in the studio of Lecoq de Boisbaudran, but it was the masters in the Louvre that really formed Fantin's taste. He spent years diligently studying and copying the works of Delacroix, Hals, Rubens and the Venetians.

Although friendly with contemporary painters and writers, Fantin gradually withdrew from this active society to paint group portraits and still lifes in his own conservative style. His method of handling paint produced an overall effect of mysterious distance, nearly photographic in its realistic rendering of texture and color. In 1862 Fantin's first experimentation with lithography led him to express his love of music in romantic, imaginative operatic scenes from Wagner, Berlioz and Schumann.

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