1824-1898 French Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Art Galleries Born in Lyons on Dec. 14, 1824, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes belonged to the generation of Gustave Courbet and ??douard Manet, and he was fully aware of their revolutionary achievements. Nevertheless, he was drawn to a more traditional and conservative style. From his first involvement with art, which began after a trip to Italy and which interrupted his intention to follow the engineering profession that his father practiced, Puvis pursued his career within the scope of academic classicism and the Salon. Even in this chosen arena, however, he was rejected, particularly during the 1850s. But he gradually won acceptance. By the 1880s he was an established figure in the Salons, and by the 1890s he was their acknowledged master. In both personal and artistic ways Puvis career was closely linked with the avant-grade. In the years of his growing public recognition, when he began to serve on Salon juries, he was consistently sympathetic to the work of younger, more radical artists. Later, as president of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts - the new Salon, as it was called - he was able to exert even more of a liberalizing influence on the important annual exhibitions. Puvis sympathy to new and radical artistic directions was reflected in his own painting. Superficially he was a classicist, but his personal interpretation of that style was unconventional. His subject matter - religious themes, allegories, mythologies, and historical events - was clearly in keeping with the academic tradition. But his style eclipsed his outdated subjects: he characteristically worked with broad, simple compositions, and he resisted the dry photographic realism which had begun to typify academic painting about the end of the century. In addition, the space and figures in his paintings inclined toward flatness, calling attention to the surface on which the images were depicted. These qualities gave his work a modern, abstract look and distinguished it from the sterile tradition to which it might otherwise have been linked. Along with their modern, formal properties, Puvis paintings exhibited a serene and poetic range of feeling. His figures frequently seem to be wrapped in an aura of ritualistic mystery, as though they belong in a private world of dreams or visions. Yet these feelings invariably seem fresh and sincere. This combination of form and feeling deeply appealed to certain avant-garde artists of the 1880s and 1890s. Although Puvis claimed he was neither radical nor revolutionary, he was admired by the symbolist poets, writers, and painters - including Paul Gauguin and Maurice Denis - and he influenced the neoimpressionist painter Georges Seurat. During his mature career Puvis executed many mural paintings. In Paris he did the Life of St. Genevieve (1874-1878) in the Panth??on and Science, Art, and Letters (1880s) in the Sorbonne. In Lyons he executed the Sacred Grove, the Antique Vision, and Christian Inspiration (1880s) in the Mus??e des Beaux-Arts. He painted Pastoral Poetry (1895-1898) in the Boston Public Library. These commissions reflect the high esteem with which Puvis was regarded during his own lifetime. Among his most celebrated oil paintings are Hope (1872) and the Poor Fisherman (1881). He died in Paris on Oct. 10, 1898.  Related Paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes :. | The Poor Fisherman | The Poor Fisherman | THe Balloon | The Poor Fisheman | Thommas - Alfred Jones, Member of Stockbrokerage House |
Related Artists:
Emile Pinchart
French, 1842 to 1924
johann friedrich august tischbein
German Painter, 1750-1812. 1750 Maastricht ?C Heidelberg 1812. First he was a pupil of his father Johann Valentin Tischbein (1715-1768) in Hildburghausen, from 1768 one of his uncle Johann Heinrich Tischbein the elder (1722-1789) in Kassel. Supported by Prince Friedrich von Waldeck he stayed in Paris from 1772 until 1777, where he studied at the academy of arts under N. B. L??pici?? (1735-1784). Afterwards he travelled to Rome, where he got in contact with the painters A.R. Mengs (1728-1779), J.L. David (1748-1825) and Fr.H. F??ger (1751-1818) and probably also with the English style of portrait painting. 1779 he travelled to Naples. In 1780 he returned to Arolsen via Vienna, Munich, Stuttgart and Kassel, where he worked for the Prince of Waldeck. From 1780 he was his councillor and court painter. During this time he made several journeys e.g. to Holland and after 1785 to Weimar where he met Wieland (1785), Schlegel (1792) and other important people. From 1795 he worked for Leopold III. of Anhalt-Dessau. 1800 he succeeded A. Fr. Oeser (1717-1799) as director of the academy of arts in Leipzig. From 1806 to 1808 he stayed in St Petersburg. He died 1812 when he visited his daughter Caroline Wilken (1783-1843) in Heidelberg
Perov, Vasily
Russian Painter, 1834-1882 Russian painter. Son of a public prosecutor, he studied intermittently at Arzamas from 1846 to 1849 at the Art School of Alexander Stupin (1776-1862), a classicist painter whose School was the first of its type in provincial Russia, and during the 1850s at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under Sergey Zaryanko. The work of Pavel Fedotov, pictorial satire in the press and genre scenes by the Old Dutch masters and William Hogarth were the greatest formative influences on Perov. His early works, permeated by a Biedermeier romantic spirit, combine detailed brushwork with anecdotal narrative and aim at criticizing social behaviour in line with the contemporary democratic doctrines of such writers as Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Such anti-clerical pictures as the Village Sermon (1861; Moscow, Tret'yakov Gal.) are distinguished by a particular irony. As in the prose of Nikolai Leskov, which has many affinities with Perov's painting, there is a conflict between feelings of love and hatred, and between an intimate knowledge of the daily life of the people and an alienating irony. In 1862-4 Perov travelled abroad, working mainly in Paris, where he painted a series of vivid genre scenes of city life. Perov's success as a genre painter reached its peak in the latter half of the 1860s. His compositions become more laconic and expressive; overcoming an indisciplined use of colour, he achieved an impressive unity with an austere greyish-brown palette. Such works as the Drowned Girl (1867) and the Last Tavern by the City Gates