Tannhauser

Henri Fantin-Latour was a devoted Wagnerian at a time when Wagner's music was still provocative and divisive in Paris, and his Symbolist-tinged fantasy paintings, which he called compositions imaginaires, represent a sustained effort to find a pictorial equivalent for the emotional and sensory experience of music. Tannhauser takes its subject from Wagner's opera of the same name, in which the knight Tannhauser is held captive in the Venusberg, a subterranean realm of pleasure presided over by Venus and her nymphs. Fantin-Latour was not illustrating a specific scene so much as evoking an atmosphere: the tension between sensual enchantment and longing, between the dark water and the luminous figures above it. He exhibited works from this series repeatedly at the Paris Salon throughout the 1860s and 1870s, building a reputation among collectors and musicians alike as the painter who could see Wagner's music. The Symbolist character of these works, their rejection of anecdote in favor of mood and allegory, places them in the lineage of Moreau and Redon even as Fantin-Latour maintained his connections to the Realist circle around Courbet and Manet.