Although he has been dead since October 24, 1898, critical battles are still fought over the artistic merits of Puvis de Chavannes. Whether you agree with Huysmans and call this mural painter a pasticheur of the Italian Primitives, or else the greatest artist in decoration since Paolo Veronese, depends much on your critical temperament. There are many to whom Henri Martin's gorgeous colour—really the methods of Monet applied to vast spaces—or the blazing originality of Albert Besnard make more intimate appeal than the pallid poetry, solemn rhythms, and faded moonlit tonal gamut of Puvis. Because the names of Gustave Moreau and Puvis were often associated, Huysmans, ab irato, cries against the "obsequious heresy" of the conjunction, forgetting that the two men were friends. Marius Vauchon, despite his excessive admiration for Puvis has rendered a service to his memory in his study, because he has shown us the real, not the legendary man. With Vauchon, we are far from Huysmans, and his succinct, but disagreeable, epigram: C'est un vieux rigaudon qui s'essaie dans le requiem. The truth is, that some idealists were disappointed to find Puvis to be a sane, healthy, solidly built man, a bon vivant in the best sense of the phrase, without a suggestion of the morbid, vapouring pontiff or haughty Olympian. Personally he was not in the least like his art, a crime that sentimental persons seldom forgive. A Burgundian—born at Lyons, December 14, 1824—he possessed all the characteristics of his race. Asceticism was the last quality to seek in him. A good dinner with old vintage, plenty of comrades, above all the society of his beloved Princess Cantacuzene, whose love of her husband was the one romance in his career; these, and twelve hours' toil a day in his atelier made up the long life of this distinguished painter. He lived for a half-century between his two ateliers, on the Place Pigalle, and at Neuilly. Notwithstanding his arduous combat with the Institute and public indifference, his cannot be called an unhappy existence. He had his art, in the practice of which he was a veritable fanatic; he was rich through inheritance, and he was happy in his love; affluence, art, love, a triad to attain, for which most men yearn, came to Puvis. Yet the gadfly of ambition was in his flesh. 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. Like father, like son, was true in this case, though the young De Chavannes, after some opposition, elected painting as his profession. He had fallen ill, and a trip to Italy was ordained. There he did not, as has been asserted, linger over Pompeii, or in the Roman Catacombs, but saved his time and enthusiasm for the Quattrocentisti. He admired the old Umbrian and Tuscan masters, he was ravished by the basilica of St. Francis at Assisi, and by Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Titian, Tintoretto, finally Veronese, riveted his passion for what has been falsely styled the "archaic." Returning to Paris he was conducted by his friend Beauderon to the studio of Delacroix, whom he adored. He remained just fifteen days, when the shop was closed. Delacroix, in a rage because of the lack of talent and funds among his pupils, sent them away. Puvis had been under the tuition of Henri, the brother of Ary Scheffer, and for years spoke with reverence of that serious but mediocre painter. He next sought the advice of Couture, and remained with him three months, not, however, quarrelling with the master, as did later another pupil, Edouard Manet. Puvis was tractable enough; he had one failing—not always a sign of either talent or the reverse—he refused to see or paint as he was told by his teachers, or, indeed, like other pupils. Because of this stubbornness, his enemies, among whom ranked the most powerful critics of Paris, declared that he had never been grounded in the elements of his art, that he could not draw or design, that his colour-sense only proved colour-blindness. To be sure, he does not boast a fulgurant brush, and his line is often stiff and awkward; but he had the fundamentals of decorative art well in hand.

After his death thousands of sketches, designs, pencilled memoranda, and cartoons were found, and then there was whistled another tune. His draughtsmanship is that of a decorative artist, as the Rodin drawings are those of a sculptor, not of a painter. Considering the rigid standard by which the work of Puvis was judged, criticism was not altogether wrong, as was claimed when the wave of reaction set in. His easel pictures are not ingratiating. He does not show well in a gallery. He needs huge spaces in which to swim about; there he makes the compositions of other men seem pigmy. [It is the case of Wagner repeated, though there is little likeness between the ideas of the Frenchman and the German, except an epical bigness. Judged by the classical concert-room formulas, Wagner must not be compared with the miniaturist Mendelssohn. His form is the form of the music-drama, not the symphonic form.] Puvis adhered to one principle: A wall is a wall, and not an easel picture; it is flat, and that flatness must be emphasised, not disguised; decoration is the desideratum. He contrived a schematic painting that would harmonise with the flatness, with the texture and the architectural surroundings, and, as George Moore has happily said: "No other painter ever kept this end so strictly before his eyes. For this end Chavannes reduced his palette almost to a monochrome, for this end he models in two flat tints, for this end he draws in huge undisciplined masses.... Mural decoration, if it form part of the wall, should be a variant of the stonework." One might take exception to the word "undisciplined"—Puvis was one of the most calculating painters that ever used a brush, and one of the most cerebral. His favourite aphorism was: "Beauty is character." His figures have been called immobile, his palette impoverished; the unfair sex abused his lean, lanky female creatures, and finally he was named a painter for Lent—for fast-days. Even the hieratic figures of Moreau were pronounced opulent in comparison with the pale moonlighted spectres of the Puvis landscapes. Courbet, in Paris, was known as the "furious madman"; Puvis, as the "tranquil lunatic." Nine of his pictures were refused at the Salon, though in 1859 he exhibited there his Return from Hunting, and, in 1861, even received a second-class medal. His fecundity was enormous. His principal work comprises the Life of Ste. GeneviÈve (the saint is a portrait of his princess), at the PanthÉon; Summer and Winter at the HÔtel de Ville, the decorations for the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, the decorations at Rouen, Inter Artes et Naturam; at Rouen, The Sacred Wood, Vision Antique, The Rhone, The SaÔne; the decorations at Amiens, War, Peace, Rest, Labour, Ave Picardia Nutrix, and two smaller grisailles, Vigilance and Fancy; at Marseilles, the Marseilles, Porte d' Orient, and Marseilles, the Greek Colony; the decorations for the Boston Public Library, and his easel picture, The Poor Fisherman, now in the Luxembourg. As to this latter, the painter explained that he had found the model in the person of a wretchedly poor fisherman at the estuary of the Seine; the young girl is a sister, and the landscape is that of the surroundings, though, as is the case with Puvis, greatly generalised. The above is but a slender list. New York has at the Metropolitan Museum at least one of his works, and in the collection here of John Quinn, Esq., there is the brilliant masterpiece, The Beheading of John the Baptist, and two large mural decorations, The River and The Vintage. They were painted in 1866. They are magnificent museum pictures.

All his frescoes are applied canvases. He didn't worry much over antique methods, nor can it be said that his work is an attempt to rehabilitate the Italian Primitives. On the contrary, Puvis is distinctly modern, and that is his chief offence in the eyes of official French art; while the fact that his "modernity" was transposed to decorative purposes, and appeared in so strange a guise, caused the younger men to eye him suspiciously. (Just as some recalcitrant music-critics refuse to recognise in certain compositions of Johannes Brahms the temperamental romantic.) Thus in the estimation of rival camps Puvis fell between two stools. He has been styled a latter-day Domenico Ghirlandajo, but this attribution rings more literary than literal.

Mr. Brownell with his accustomed sense of critical values has to our notion definitely summed up the question: "His classicism is absolutely unacademic, his romanticism unreal beyond the verge of mysticism and so preoccupied with visions that he may almost be called a man for whom the actual world does not exist—in the converse of Gautier's phrase. His distinction is wholly personal. He lives evidently on a high plane, dwells habitually in the delectable highlands of the intellect. The fact that his work is almost wholly decorative is not at all accidental. His talent, his genius, if one chooses, requires large spaces, vast dimensions. There has been a good deal of profitless discussion as to whether he expressly imitates the Primitives or reproduces them sympathetically; but really he does neither, he deals with their subjects occasionally, but always in a completely modern as well as a thoroughly personal way. His colour is as original as his general treatment and composition."

His men and women are not precisely pagan, nor are they biblical. But they reveal traits of both strained through a drastic "modern" intellect. They are not abstractions; the men are virile, the women maternal. There is the spirit of humanity, not of decadence. Puvis, like Moreau, did not turn his back to the rising sun. He admired Degas, Manet, Monet. At first he patterned after his friend Chasseriau, a fine and too-little-known painter, and at one time a mural decorator before he became immersed in Oriental themes. The lenten landscapes of Puvis are not merely scenic backgrounds, but integral parts of the general decorative web, and they are not conceived in No Man's Land, but selected from the vicinity of Paris. Puvis is by no means a virtuoso. His pace is usually andante; but he knows how to evoke a mood, summon the solemn music of mural spaces. His is a theme with variations. The wall or ceiling is ever the theme. His crabbed fugues soon melt into the larger austere music of the wall. His choral walls are true epopÉes. He is a master harmonist. He sounds oftener the symphonic than the lyric note. He gains his most moving effects without setting in motion the creaking allegorical machinery of the academy. He shows the simple attitudes of life transfigured without rhetoric. He avoids frigid allegory, yet employs symbols. His tonal attenuations, elliptical and syncopated rhythms, his atmosphere of the remote, the mysterious—all these give the spectator the sense of serenity, momentary freedom from the feverishness of every-day life, and suggest the lofty wisdom of the classic poets. But the serpent of futile melancholy, of the brief cadence of mortal dreams, and of the vanishing seconds that defile down the corridor of time, has stolen into this Garden of the Hesperides. Puvis de Chavannes, no more than Gustave Moreau, could escape the inquietude of his times. He is occasionally Parisian and often pessimist.

The inability of his contemporaries to understand his profound decorative genius, his tact in the handling of the great problem of lighting—the key is always higher because of the different or softer light of public buildings and the gloom of churches—and his feeling for the wall, purely as wall, a flat space, not to be confounded with the pseudo art that would make the picture like an open window in the wall, but based on the flatness of the material and the aerial magic of his spacing, sorely troubled him for half a century. Doubtless it was his refusal to visit Boston and study there the architectural conditions of the Public Library that resulted in the hang-fire of his decorations, though they are of an exalted order. One at least served as a spring-board for the decorative impulse of Besnard, as may be noted in his frescoes on the ceiling at the HÔtel de Ville, Paris.

That Puvis de Chavannes was not an unfeeling Bonze of art, but a man of tender heart and warm affections was proved after the death of his much-loved Princess Marie Cantacuzene. Two months later sorrow over her loss killed him. He had painted the thousand and one expressive moments in the life of our species as a hymn to humanity, and their contours are eternal. Eternal? A vain phrase; but eternal till the canvas fades and the walls decay, that is nearer the truth. Art is long and appreciation sometimes a chilly consolation. Let us stick to the eternal verities. As D'Annunzio has it: Quella musica silenziosa delle linee immobili era cosÌ possente che creava il fantasma quasi visibile di una vita piÙ ricca e piÙ bella.