In the midst of the most stormy period that France has seen for ten years, in the turbulence of political and national tumult, Puvis de Chavannes passed from his country’s life into its history. During the week that saw the fall of the Brisson Ministry, when Paris was a sea of frantic demonstration and safety assured by military law, he died: his life a gospel of serenity and peace, his genius and its expressions a glory to his people, an inspiration to present and future Art. At once his character stands out with the marvellous distinctness all things assume when they first become the past, on the first morrow in which we look back to them as yesterday.

The death of this great frescoist and painter leaves a place unfilled. He has had no equal, no predecessor, and his successor is not easy to name. To produce this original genius, whose grandiose, sublime, yet simple productions appeal not only to the artist and the critic, but to the peasant, who stands long and enthralled before the Ste. GeneviÈve of the PanthÉon, is the creation of half a century, and due to peculiar circumstances of time and race. He was a great man as well as a great painter; his temperament full of sun and humour, his soul calm and of crystalline clearness.

Puvis de Chavannes was born in Lyons in 1824, of an old Bourguignonne family, the warmth and glory of Burgundy in his veins; he was of vigorous physique, of gay and sanguine temperament, attached by a subtle lien to the school which for six centuries has produced great painters, great sculptors and dreamers.

Puvis de Chavannes went to school as a boy at the LycÉe of Lyons, later to the LycÉe Henri Quatre in Paris. He was a painter by selection; had partially fitted himself for a scientific profession, when after careful consideration he deliberately chose the career of a painter. From the moment of his decision he never wavered, but gave to the province of art he had made his own the absolute devotion of the enthusiast, the fierce unremitting toil of which only great genius is capable. His student life began in the studio of

Couture, and lasted but three months. The methods in the atelier were uncongenial to him.

“Is that the way you see the model?” he asked of Couture, whose formula of blanc d’argent, jaune de Naples, vermilion and cobalt produced on the canvas a very different effect to that which Puvis de Chavannes recognised. He left the place and never returned, but continued to paint for several years under Henri Schaffer.

There was no school for the unfolding of this spirit, unlike its times, greater than the masters, and lonely. For as it proved for thirty years, the path of Puvis de Chavannes was to be a solitary way. He walked in it with front serene, and proud stoicism and a savage devotion, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, for who should observe or follow, making unerringly toward the brilliant goal and the immortal fame hidden from those who scoffed at him, and which even his vision but dimly saw.

In 1850 a PietÀ was accepted at the Salon; in 1861 “La Paix et la Guerre” received the second medal; one of the decorations was bought by the State, and the painter, in a glow of enthusiasm over this first recognition after eleven years of waiting, presented the other picture to the MusÉe at Amiens. These pictures, however, failed to win him general appreciation; he was the object of constant adverse criticism for thirty years, and it was sufficient for him to complete a work to awaken a perfect hubbub of abuse; he was the sport of the wit and the cartoonist, the artistic joke of the time. During this period he bent to his labour, his ears closed, his eyes open to all of beauty, and his mind free to receive impressions. To the heavenly vision alone he was obedient, and when, in 1892, public favour burst forth in a storm of applause, he seemed to hear it scarcely more than he had heard the noise of dispraise. In his atelier at Neuilly, an immense building full of scaffolding and apparatus for sustaining and elevating his pictures, he shut himself from the world and stood before his canvas from morning until night, never breaking his fast until he had completed nine hours of work. Infinitely apart, removed from critics and admirers, he was the absorbed dreamer, seeking ever to transmit, to make visible his dream.

After his work-day was over he gave himself freely to his friends. To the struggling unknown he was most sympathetic, and the fact that a young artist was

unpopular and misunderstood would win for him at once an interest from Puvis de Chavannes.

They say of him that he was absolutely indifferent to public opinion; but once, indeed, criticism touched his spirit to bitterness. “When Hades wants to lay new paving-stones, it will not fail to consign the commission to Puvis de Chavannes, a man of good intentions and vast ideas who has promised for twenty years to give us a masterpiece. This he will never do, for he can neither draw nor paint.” This was from the pen of Edmond About, a professed admirer and friend of the painter. Of the defection Puvis never spoke without bitterness. Alexandre Dumas, too, shot his barbs. “Puvis knows so little of drawing that he should scarcely permit himself the luxury of not painting.” But ThÉophile Gautier and ThÉodore de Banville, the poet who wrote Gringoire, were amongst the few who appreciated Puvis de Chavannes. In the stupid blindness of the time it needed a poet’s eye to discern this peculiar ethereal form of beauty to which his own perceptions and productions were kin.

Puvis de Chavannes was surrounded by an atmosphere of unbroken calm through which jarring contact with the world never penetrated to trouble the spirit. This separation enabled him to give from a height, from the impenetrable distance into which he withdrew, his ennobling inspiring creations.

Hitherto, in mural decorations and in frescoes, landscape formed an inferior part; it was a subordinate background, complementary to the figures, unreal, exaggerated, brilliant, glaring. It remained for Puvis de Chavannes to introduce into his frescoes the country of France with its exquisite atmospheric effects; to make rivers, trees, fields, and woods dignified, expressive parts of his composition; as a landscape painter he occupies a place with Corot, Rousseau, Troyon.

There could not be a greater distance between schools than that of this master and the men of his period.

The loves of the shepherds, the follies of Olympus, Greek myths, with little logical bearing on place or object decorated, had been the subjects chosen for the walls and ceilings of public monuments and public buildings. From these uninspired conceptions to the creations of Puvis de Chavannes is a decided transition. His compositions, never fantastic or impossible, are the highest conceptions of the real, as well as visions of

the most exalted flight of a beautiful imagination. He chose his subjects himself always, and never permitted a suggestion. Ceilings he did not like to decorate; it seemed to him an unnatural form. “I seek,” he said, “to open a window on to the real,” and it has been said that he opened one into the soul.

In his work there is “a union of the mind of the antique and the spirit of Christian art.” He was a great believer, as one of his friends said—un immense croyant.

Of his faith or dogma his art, however, tells us nothing definite. The legends of saints are no less breathing evidences of a distinct credo, than the mythical figures in the Vision Antique and other works of the same character are expressions of harmony with the Greek pagan spirit. It is the expansive, all-embracing province of highest art the faith in, the love for Beauty which is the creed of Puvis de Chavannes; and it is the manner in which this inspired genius conceived and presented the forms of Beauty that separated him so vastly from his materialistic forerunners and contemporaries in France.

Hitherto the human form had been presented, for the most part, for the delectation of the sense alone. Corporeal, physical beauty absorbed the painter, and awakened in return such admiration as this form of art expressed with greater or less refinement and power will always evoke. The artist, for the most part not believing in soul, scarcely suggested its existence. Not since the early Italians has any one painted as Puvis de Chavannes. Meditation, indifference to the world, absorption in his work, aided his development, “his genius unfolded in solitude.” The human form was to him the shadow, and the soul the reality; he made earthly beauty a veil for his idea of the eternal; form he subordinated to his thought. “I try,” he said, “through the shade to suggest the essence.” Nor let it be advanced that over his incapacity to draw Puvis de Chavannes threw concealing mistiness. His pastels, his drawings, the figures he has seen fit to leave nude, or semi-nude, disprove this.

In 1872 he was made a member of the jury of the first Salon instituted by the State. A vivid remembrance of his own disappointment made him seek to introduce leniency into the judgments. He could not avail, and he resigned. On the next day, all his own canvases (which, no longer being a member of the jury, he had a right to exhibit) were refused. What the

criterion of public taste in Art was at this time, certain pictures in the Luxembourg and the Louvre attest! The jurors and the judges are forgotten. Puvis de Chavannes, however, is remembered, with the distinguished company of the Refused—Courbet, DuprÉ, BaryÉ, Troyon, Rousseau, Diaz, Millet, Corot. It was not until he had produced a great number of his masterpieces that his success was determined—his genius recognised. He then ceased to be the individual, the sport of vulgar pen and brush, and became the symbol of his work as the flag is of patriotism. He became a gift, a force, a glory, which France before his death revered, and which she justly honours. He was made President of the Academy of Fine Arts at the new Salon, Champs de Mars, and wore the cross of the Legion of Honour.

It would take volumes to speak in detail of the works of Puvis de Chavannes. A list of them is as follows. Thus far I think it can be said that there are no volumes that deal with him or his works technically. The technique of painting can only be interesting to painters when discussed by the profession; and such books are almost unknown.

“The PietÀ” (1850); “La Paix et la Guerre” (1861); “Travail et Repos” (1865), in the MusÉe of Amiens; “Ave Picardia Nutrix” (1865); “Ludus,” “Pro Patria,” “Doux Pays,” all in the gallery of Picardie (1879); “Marseille, Porte d’Orient,” and “Marseille, Colonie Grecque”—Marseilles Museum (1867); “St. Radegonde and Charles Martel”—HÔtel de Ville at Poitiers (1872); “Ste. GeneviÈve of the PanthÉon, Paris” (1877); “Bois SacrÉ,” “La RhÔne et La SaÔne,” “L’Inspiration ChrÉtienne,”—MusÉe at Lyons (1883); “L’Art CÉramique,” “Inter Artes et Naturam,” and “Groupe”—MusÉe at Rouen (1890-92); “L’Hiver,” “L’EtÉ,” “Victor Hugo offrant son Lyre À la Ville de Paris”—HÔtel de Ville, Paris (1893); “Lettres, Arts et Muses”—Sorbonne Paris (1894). Lastly, another continent called his genius to create something for its generations to hand down to fame, and for the Boston Library Puvis de Chavannes painted “Le GÉnie Messager de LumiÈre.”

“The Childhood of Ste. GeneviÈve,” four panels to the glory of the patron saint of Paris, covers a portion of the right wall of the PanthÉon. This was the first decoration given at the close of the war of the Commune. The subjects are the pious Childhood, the

Consecration, and the Miracles of the Saint; and there are no more beautiful expressions of religious art in the contemporaneous French school.

The figures are strong, simple, natural. The background is a summer landscape, of exquisite loveliness. In the foreground are the rugged, rustic peasants, the pastoral life, and the pure figure of the child GeneviÈve. The atmosphere is tender, the composition dignified and impressive, and the scenes are pervaded with peace. These pastoral paintings were a new era in the school of plein air. One does not ask if the setting is an anachronism. Puvis de Chavannes, to aid him in the production of this masterpiece, read no histories, studied no text-books regarding the costumes and manners of the times of the saint. He went to the plain of Nanterre, absorbed himself in the atmosphere of the country around Paris. The Seine and Mont ValÉrien became his background and setting. Then he shut himself in his studio at Neuilly, where Ste. GeneviÈve and her people appeared to him as he painted them on the PanthÉon walls. If these pictures suggest the Florentine renaissance, it is because the monastic religious, the naive simplicity, are sympathetic with the spirit of the Italian painters. The frescoes are full of a fine effulgence, animated by a flame as mysterious as that in a virgin’s lamp before a dim mediÆval shrine. He received the order in 1883 to decorate the staircase in the Palais des Arts at Lyons. He painted the Bois SacrÉ and the symbolic figures of the RhÔne and the SaÔne. For this work he received the sum of 40,000 francs. His expenses were 10,000, and the fresco took him three years to paint, making about 6000 francs that he was paid for these splendid works of art—the price that a modern portrait-painter of distinction would refuse for a picture of one of the beau-monde. This order completed, the painter looked and waited in vain for new walls and decorations. “For me,” he said, “the horizon seems to close down upon the future: there remains nothing for me to do but to battle against indolence; but if I can inspire youth with the example of a life of labour, not altogether fruitless, I shall have lived to some purpose.” And again: “They come slowly,” he said, “these vast spaces whereon I may express myself with broad, free sweep.” When he first received the order to decorate the hemicycle of the Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne at a price of 35,000 francs, he refused, and the committee received a letter of acceptance from him the next day.

In the meantime he had found his subject; as for the question of the ridiculous price offered him, he did not even refer to it.

His production was enormous, his energy untiring. After months of labour he would go to the seaside, and give himself up to rest and indolence. “In these times I am in despair,” he said, “and feel as though I should never work again. Delightful as is this repose, it is to the days of labour that I look back with the greatest pleasure. It seems as though my power were gone for ever.” This he wrote from Dieppe, where he was digging shrimps in the sand like a boy. He began his studies for the career of an artist late. What other men accomplished and put by he saw fulfilled in his own day. And because of his unusual vigour and fecund power of production he realised in mature years what to others are the dreams of youth. It is this juvenance carried into ripe age that gives a virginal freshness to his painting. His fresco in the Boston Library, as well as the work upon which he was engaged at the time of his death—“The Old Age of Ste. GeneviÈve,” a new series for the PanthÉon—far from suggesting declining power, possess the fresh bloom by which only the young spirit can make beautiful its creations. The painter had reached an apotheosis of power. He had been the product of a country whose times are strange and complex. His land, his race, its blood and tradition generated his genius, and he leaves to it in turn his glory, and the stirring example of his life, at the time of his country’s need, it may be well said; and the relics of his beautiful art will remain, when political crusade, when exaggerated types and schools are past and forgotten.