Puvis De Chavannes: Some Reasons for a Reputation

Abstract

Among the painters of the nineteenth century, the reputation of Puvis de Chavannes is a thing apart.1 Artists and critics of tradition, the Academy itself, and innovators who were attacking the old school, alike admired and defended him. But though from 1880 to 1900 he was acclaimed in a manner and with a unanimity accorded few modern artists, little that is today considered praiseworthy by either the aesthetic right or left has come out of the manner he established. He was indeed such an isolated figure that his work appears (mistakenly) to have no chronological attachments. Both his origins and his affinities seem obscure; he is difficult to place in relation to his immediate stylistic predecessors, to his contemporaries, or to those few men of the next generation upon whom, in fact, his work did have its measure of effect.