Fantin-Latour seems to escape classification within 19th century painting and printmaking, a rare quality for an artist of his time. Born in Grenoble to a society portraitist father who was his first teacher, he moved to Paris with his family while he was still a child. In addition to a classic apprenticeship which he began at the age of fifteen, he learned from the Masters at the Louvre, a lesson that he never forgot, remaining faithful his whole career to a traditional technique. Much of his later career was devoted to lithography. He greatly admired Richard Wagner and did imaginative lithographs illustrating his music and that of other Romantic composers such as Berlioz and Schumann.