Peace

After a very short academic training, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes went on to become recognized as the best mural painter of his generation. He modeled his early work after Italian frescoes in the classical style with idealized figures arranged in pastoral settings. His most notable commissions were murals for the walls of the Panthéon (1874-98), the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon (1883-86), the Great Amphitheater of the Sorbonne (1889), and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen (1891). Also in 1891, Puvis was commissioned to paint nine murals for the Boston Public Library, the only murals by the artist outside of France. Although Puvis was a contemporary and friend of many of the Impressionists, Symbolists, and Post-Impressionists, his work was never classified as belonging to one of those styles. He was self-taught and would go on to influence the work of Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and others. An indication of his influence on this younger generation of artists was the inclusion of 15 of his works in the historic 1913 Armory Show in New York, which introduced these “modern” European artists to the United States. In 1895, a banquet hosted by Auguste Rodin was held in Paris, attended by Monet, Renoir, Boudin, Pissarro, Carrière, Gauguin, Zola, Proust, and over 500 other notable figures in the arts, to honor the 70-year-old Puvis. The fact that his work was purchased by two major American modern art collectors, Albert Barnes and Duncan Phillips, is another indicator of the impact of Puvis’s art on modernism. In 1861, Puvis received a second-class medal for history painting at the official Paris Salon for his two murals, Concordia (Peace) and Bellum (War). Six years later, in order to present his work to a wider public, Puvis painted “reductions” or easel paintings from these two murals and from the other two in the set, Le Repos (Rest) and Le Travail (Work).