He entered the École des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, in 1854, where he had for classmates, Edgar Degas, Alphonse Legros and Jean-Charles Cazin.

A member of the so-called Cénacle des Batignolles, or group of 1863, from where from Impressionism originated, he was, according to Gustave Kahn, a kind of the link between their painters and romantic painting.

In the hierarchy of genres enacted by the Academy of Fine Arts since the 17th century, the still life of fruit or flowers was considered a minor category.

By ignoring any literary, religious or historical context, supposed to confer value and nobility on the work, he adopted the opposite stance of academicism.

Edwin and Ruth Edwards, his English patrons and merchants, recommended that he always used simple vases and table tops in order to exhibit his great talent in rendering texture and color.

[5] After his first Salon submissions were rejected in 1859, he began exhibiting with his friend Édouard Manet and the future Impressionists Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet.

[7] Fantin renovated the collective portraiture with paintings who served as large manifestos: Homage to Delacroix (1864), A Studio at Les Batignolles (1870), a tribute to Manet, The Corner of the Table (1872), a homage to the Parnassian poets, including Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, and Around the Piano (1885), a tribute to musicians and musicologists of his time.

[3] In A Studio at Les Batignolles, Manet is depicted in the center in the act of painting, while he is surrounded of several important painters and writers, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Zacharie Astruc, Emile Zola, Frédéric Bazille and Claude Monet.

[8] He would later publish lithographs inspired by Richard Wagner in La revue wagnérienne, which helped solidify his reputation among Paris' avant-garde as an anti-naturalist painter.

Marcel Proust mentions Fantin-Latour's work in In Search of Lost Time: "Many young women's hands would be incapable of doing what I see there," said the Prince, pointing to Mme de Villeparisis's unfinished watercolours.