^ Born on 14 December 1824: Pierre Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, French Symbolist painter who died on 24 October 1898.
— Puvis de Chavannes decorated many public buildings in France (for example, the Panthéon, the Sorbonne, and the Hôtel de Ville, all in Paris) and also Boston Public Library. His paintings were done on canvas and then affixed to the walls (marouflage), but their pale colors imitated the effect of fresco. He had only modest success early in his career (when a private income enabled him to work for little payment), but he went on to achieve an enormous reputation, and he was universally respected even by artists of very different aims and outlook from his own. Gauguin, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec were among his professed admirers. His reputation has since declined, his idealized depictions of antiquity or allegorical representations of abstract themes now often seeming rather anaemic. He remains important, however, because of his influence on younger artists. His simplified forms, respect for the flatness of the picture surface, rhythmic line, and use of non-naturalistic color to evoke the mood of the painting appealed to both the Post-Impressionists and the Symbolists.
— The greatest French decorative painter. His international influence was even greater than that of Moreau. He had to abandon his studies at the Polytechnique because of illness and travelled in Italy during his convalescence, where he discovered the frescoes of the Quattrocento and decided to become a painter. Ary Scheffer, Couture, Delacroix (for 4 days) and above all Théodore Chassériau were his teachers at the Beaux-Arts. In 1850, exhibited a pietà at the Salon. In 1861 his career as a painter of murals for public buildings began with the Musée d'Amiens. He decorated many buildings, including the Panthéon, the Hôtels de Ville of Paris and Poitiers, the Sorbonne, various French museums, and the Boston Public Library. A very French mind - to the extent that his work attracted that other very French painter, Matisse - he brought to his art a sense of grandeur and an organisational logic that were precisely the gifts required for vast mural decorations. His decorative compositions attempt to reach monumentality not through depth but through superficiality, linearity of construction, the "majesty" of the organisation and also by a certain philosophical pretention. The mobility of the man is clear; the influence of his work quite outstripped its intrinsic qualities, but he was, whether we like it or not, one of the masters of the Symbolist age, an age which made of Beauty and the Pure Idea a veritable religion.
— Puvis de Chavannes by Étienne Carjat (photograph, 11x8cm) — Pierre Puvis de Chavannes by Lily Lewis Rood (color lithograph, 49x35cm, a modernist non-portrait)
— LINKS
— Death and the Maiden — The Dream — The Poor Fisherman — Vigilance (235x93cm) — The Meditation (1867, 106x53cm) — Mary Magdalene at St Baume (1869, 54x37cm) — Saint Genoveva as a child in prayer (1876, 136x76cm) — Young Girls at the Seaside (1879, 61x47cm) — Mad Woman at the Edge of the Sea (1857) — Hope (1872) — Kneeling nude woman, viewed from back (lithograph, 18x16cm)
— Ancient Vision (1889, 105x133cm) _ The term Vision which the artist chose as the title of this picture is symptomatic of a state of mind that rejected the modern world and escaped into dreams and visions of a vanished world characterised by a total communion between man and nature, where everything was tranquil and beautiful. (cf. Sir Edward Burne-Jones' dreams of an Arthurian arcadia)
— Concordia (1861, 60x81cm) _ Puvis de Chavannes’ development was hardly determined by the brief and fleeting instruction received from Henri Scheffer, Delacroix and Thomas Couture. He has as little in common with the older Courbet and the Naturalists as with the younger Pissarro and the Impressionists, even though he admires their uncompromising battle for their ideals. Eugène Boudin was an exact comtemporary, and the two artists have nothing in common. Puvis de Chavannes’ work is like a bridge over the painting of his age, ist piers being his friendship with Chassériau and his admiration by Seurat and Gauguin. The influence of Ingres via Chassériau is what scores his first success, in the Salon of 1861 with War and Peace, after nine years of rejection. Peace is purchased by the State and ends up in the Museum of Amiens, inspiring the later murals in the staircase. Concordia is the first sketch for Peace: the warriors have laid aside their weapons, they repose in the Elysian landscape beneath flowering laurels, refreshed by fruits and milk. The radiant white in the garb of the female figure in the background triumphs over the red of the warriors’ cloaks against the deep green landscape. In Peace the garbed female figure is replaced by a nude figure, on which all the light converges. Théophile Gautier, Chassériau’s friend, enthusiastically greeted Chavannes’ advent with this picture in the Salon of 1861. That is probably also why Concordia bears a dedication to Madame Gautier.
— The Prodigal Son (1879, 130x96cm). _. War and Peace launched Chavannes on his career as a mural painter, taking him from Amiens via Marseilles to the great Paris works in the Sorbonne, in the Hôtel de Ville and in the Panthéon – to name only these. Among these highly demanding projects, aiming at "animer les murailles", the easel paintings seem like brief pauses for rest. Chavannes never set up his easel in the open like the Impressionists, but, being an avid walker, stored up visual impressions in his memory. Questioned regarding The Prodigal Son, he said laughing that he really only wanted to paint swine, studies of which he had made in the country in 1878. He said nothing of the repentant self-communion of the poor sinner, so modestly expressed with the crossed hands of the figure driven to the limits of life — and of the picture, for, as a person, Chavannes eschewed rhetoric, and as a painter, extravagant gestures. And yet the elegiac tone is there, indeed being echoed in the same way in the Poor Fisherman, painted two years later. The abandonment of the human figure is matched by the silver-grey of dying nature, redolent of Corot, whom Chavannes so admired, and which does not deny the muralist with its rhythmically sweeping composition. [compare The Prodigal Son Feeding Swine by Murillo — The Prodigal Son in Misery by Mary Ann Willson — The Prodigal Son by Dürer]