Pierre Puvis de Chavannes · 1824–1898
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
A French painter born in Lyon in 1824 who died in 1898. Known for murals such as those in the Pantheon in Paris, his quiet, decorative compositions influenced later generations including Gauguin and Picasso.
Puvis de Chavannes was born in 1824 into a well-established textile family in Lyon. He first intended to become an engineer, but illness interrupted his studies, and on a trip to Italy to recuperate he came to aspire to be a painter. After returning home he studied under Delacroix and Thomas Couture.
He was rejected by the Salon for years, but because the rebuilding of Paris was producing public buildings one after another, he began to receive commissions for murals. He produced many large-scale works, including the Pantheon in Paris (1874-78) and the Sorbonne (1887).
His work is marked by flat, decorative compositions that play down volume, perspective, and shading, and by intermediate colors reminiscent of fresco. He drew on classical literature and myth, and his pictures are full of calm and a poetic mood. Many Japanese painters who studied in France, including Kuroda Seiki, visited his studio. The Shimane Art Museum holds a reduced version of one of his Pantheon murals.
