Art card Fantin-Latour Faust, Palais des Beaux-Arts Paris

French art postcard reproducing in black and white Faust by Henri Fantin-Latour, after the original held in the collection of the Palais des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, better known as the Petit Palais. The card bears the serial number 38 and is executed in fine rotogravure with rich tonal transitions, within which the romantic darkness of the composition is convincingly preserved. The scene shows a group of figures around a reclining female nude, with the dark silhouette of Faust on the left, faces and shadows emerging from the background, and spectral apparitions in the sky. The reverse carries the imprint Fabrication Francaise and a small circular publisher's mark. The card is unposted and in good condition, with mild discolouration and light handling marks.

Henri Fantin-Latour, born at Grenoble in 1836 and died at Bure in 1904, was a French painter and lithographer who secured a lasting place in the art history of the late nineteenth century through his group portraits of the Parisian avant-garde and his floral still lifes. Less widely known but no less central to his output are his allegorical compositions around musical and literary themes, among which a substantial series of scenes inspired by Goethe's Faust, which he continued to elaborate in drawing, lithograph and painting from the eighteen-seventies until the end of his life. The composition reproduced here belongs to the Walpurgis Night and Sabbath scenes, in which Faust, led by Mephistopheles, descends into a world of spectres, visions and sensuous apparitions. The reproduction card was issued during the first decades of the twentieth century, when the major Parisian museums had postcards of their collections printed on considerable scale.