Fairy of the Alps (c. 1885): Art, History and Details

Fairy of the Alps (c. 1885) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Henri Fantin-Latour (French, 1836–1904).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Henri Fantin-Latour’s drawings featured imaginative compositions, often inspired by the music of contemporary German composers. This sheet relates to the symphonic work Manfred by Robert Schumann (1848), a drama in which Manfred encounters apparitions while mourning his lost lover. Fantin used layers of dark charcoal to evoke the emotional tenor of his subject and to translate the experience of listening to Schumann’s music using a visual medium.

Object facts

• Title: Fairy of the Alps
• Date: c. 1885
• Creator attribution: Henri Fantin-Latour (French, 1836–1904)
• Culture: France
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: charcoal with white chalk and black chalk, with framing lines in black crayon and squaring marks in graphite, on laid paper discolored to tan
• Dimensions: Sheet: 62.5 x 46.7 cm (24 5/8 x 18 3/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2019.225

A detail from the museum

This drawing relates to a print of the same year. Fantin used this sheet to work out his composition before completing a drawing on tracing paper, which was then used to transfer the image to a lithographic stone.

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. Richard W. Whitehill Art Purchase Endowment Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hédiard, Germain. "Les Dessins de Fantin-Latour." Unpublished manuscript, 1901. Bibliothèque Nationale de France (YB3-2752-4).
• Dubourg, Victoria. Catalogue de l’œuvre complet (1849–1904) de Fantin-Latour. Paris: Floury, 1911.
• Tableaux modernes et du XIXe siècle [. . .] appartenant à M. X [. . .]. Paris: Hôtel Drouot, 1937.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.