Bathed in soft light, Venus stretches out in a seductive pose, gently touching her hair and looking down demurely. A hazy indistinctness imbues the traditional motif of the goddess of love and her son Cupid with a dreamlike quality. It was this type of subject matter and Henri Fantin-Latour's treatment of it that inspired Roger Marx, a French writer and collector, to call the artist's imaginative engravings "the most seductive hymn to grace, womanhood, and love."

Excerpt from

Heather MacDonald, DMA label copy, 2008.

• The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
  Read a biography of the artist from the Getty.