Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Works by this Artist

Poor Fisherman
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, 1881

Background

wealthy bourgeois family

Studies

with Henri Scheffer; brief study with Eugène Delacroix; with Thomas Couture

Career

1850 – exhibits Dead Christ (Gezira Museum, Cairo) at the Salon

1852 – Salon entries rejected

1854-5 – executes a series of decorative paintings for his brother’s house, Le Brouchy

1859 – resumes participation in Salon exhibitions

1861 – receives second-class Salon medal for history painting

1864 – receives first public commission from the Musée Napoléon for Ave Picardia Nutrix (in situ)

1872 – resigns as a member of Salon jury in protest of its intolerance; Puvis’s own painting, Death and the Maidens (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA) is rejected

1890 – founder-member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts along with Ernest Meissonier and Auguste Rodin

1896 – elected President of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts

1897 – marries Princess Marie Cantacuzène

Students include: Paul Baudouin and Ary Renan

Travels

Italy (1846, 1848)

Important Artworks

Hope, 1872 Salon (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)

Life of St Genviéve, 1874-78 (frescoes, Panthéon, Paris)

The Dream, 1883 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)

Inter artes et naturam (Between Art and Nature), 1888-91 (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, replica in Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Auguste Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes, 1890-1901 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)

Dealer

Paul Durand-Ruel

Readings

Goldwater, Robert. “Puvis de Chavannes: Some Reasons for a Reputation,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 28, no. 1 (March 1946): 33-43

Price, Aimee Brown. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. New York: Rizzoli, 1994

Price, Aimee Brown. “The Poor Fisherman: A Painting in Context,” in Brown, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.
Exhibition catalogue. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 1994

Price, Aimee Brown. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes: the Artist and His Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Shaw, Jennifer. Dream States: Puvis de Chavannes, Modernism, and the Fantasy of France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002

Images