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Updated: June 12, 2025
Even his most delicate pictures are largely felt and sonorously executed; not "finished" in the studio sense, but complete two different things. Fate was against him, and the position he might have had was won by the gentle Puvis de Chavannes, who exhibited a genius for decorating monumental spaces.
He has realised images in colours destined to decorate inexpensively the rooms of the people and recalling the grand aspects of landscapes with a broad simplification which is derived, curiously enough, from Puvis de Chavannes's large decorative landscapes and from the small and precise colour prints of Japan.
In modern painting such exceptions, and widely different from each other as the poles, are Couture and Puvis de Chavannes. Better than in either the true romanticists with the classic strain, or the academic romanticists with the classic temperament, the blending of the classic and romantic inspirations is illustrated in Couture. The two are in him, indeed, actually fused.
And still another very striking memory of Boston indeed, perhaps, the paramount impression! is that it contains the loveliest modern thing I saw in America namely, the Puvis de Chavannes wall-paintings on the grand staircase of the Public Library. The Library itself is a beautiful building, but it holds something more beautiful.
Quite unperturbed by current discussions, which are certainly of the noisiest by which the current of artistic development was ever deflected, he has kept on his way, and has finally won all suffrages for an æsthetic expression that is really antagonistic to the general æsthetic spirit of his time. Puvis de Chavannes is, perhaps, the most interesting figure in French painting to-day.
Was Carrière a decorative painter by nature setting aside training? We doubt it, though Morice does not hesitate to name him after Puvis de Chavannes in this field. The trouble is that he did not make many excursions into the larger forms. He painted a huge canvas, Les Théâtres Populaires, in which the interest is more intimate than epical.
"Some stunt," he replied, looking at the grimy squalor of the abandoned shop, with its ugly plate-glass windows and forbidding walls. "Don't you want me to get you a frieze for those bare walls some Chicago nymphs taking a bath in the Lake with a company of leading citizens observing them from the steps of the Art Institute, in the manner of the sainted Puvis?" "Don't be silly, Sam!"
The list would be a long and involved one, taking its start in Italy with Botticelli, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolomeo, Titian, Giorgione, and extending thence to our own time inclusive of Millet, Corot, Watts, Turner, Blake, Rousseau, Mauve, Puvis de Chavannes and Ryder—men of all complexions in art, and typical of many more quite as diverse in their subjects and modes of expression but who place the idea, the motive, the emotion, the type, before the thing depicted.
He was a visionary, even a recluse, like his friend Moreau, but a fighter for his ideas; and those ideas have shown not only French artists, but the entire world, the path back to true mural tradition. It is not an exaggeration to say that Puvis created modern decorative art. His father was chief engineer of mines, a strong-willed, successful man.
"You don't know who did those pictures?" "No." "Puvis de Chavannes." "The name is but a name to me, but the work why, they are out of the body entirely!
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