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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]
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