In 1865 Henri Fantin-Latour exhibited his second large-scale group portrait at the Paris Salon to a disastrous reception. The Toast! Homage to Truth was a terrible failure not only in the public’s eye, but also in Fantin’s own; he destroyed the painting soon after the exhibition closed. Scholars are left to wonder how shocking the painting actually was, but there are many clues – in the form of sketches and correspondence – to the problems Fantin encountered while developing this collective tribute to “Truth.” In particular, the problem was how to represent a vision of truth that was both individual and collective, both personal to Fantin and translatable to the public (or at the very least, to the group he painted). Ultimately, The Toast! Homage to Truth is a case study in a central problem surrounding group portraiture in the mid-nineteenth-century: the problem of reconciling modern notions of artistic individuality with the dream of collectivity that undergirds the genre. This essay investigates that problem by looking at several of the many surviving drawings for The Toast!, including a previously unknown and illuminating sketch in the collection of the Getty Research Institute.