Fantin-Latour painted group portraits that functioned as manifestos. Homage to Delacroix, completed in 1864, gathered Manet, Baudelaire, Whistler and others around a portrait of the recently deceased painter. A Studio at Les Batignolles, painted in 1870, arranged the same circle around Manet at his easel. The Corner of the Table, in 1872, seated Verlaine and Rimbaud among the Parnassian poets. Each painting declared an allegiance, mapped a network, and recorded the face of everyone who mattered in Parisian culture at that moment.

His flower paintings are the opposite. They are quiet, domestic, technically precise, and painted without any obvious agenda. Roses in a glass bowl. Peonies on a table. He exhibited them in England, where they sold steadily to collectors who had no interest in Parisian literary politics. In France, during his lifetime, the flowers were practically unknown. The irony is that they are what most people now associate with his name.

He trained under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, an unorthodox teacher who had his students draw from memory rather than from the model. His classmates at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts included Degas and Alphonse Legros. He was friends with Manet, Whistler, Morisot and most of the painters who became the Impressionists, but his own style remained conservative: careful drawing, smooth finish, traditional composition. He stood at the centre of the avant-garde and painted like an old master, which is an unusual position to occupy for forty years.

He was also a member of the Jinglar Society, a nine-person dining club devoted to Japanese art and ceramics, which met to eat food off Japanese plates.