Pierre Puvis de Chavannes: Paintings and Works on Paper

An exhibition of works by French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898). Comprising loans from private and public collections, this exhibition presents a selection of paintings and works on paper by a seminal artist of the late nineteenth century.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was born in Lyon, France in 1824. He worked in the studios of Henri Scheffer, Eugène Delacroix and Thomas Couture and largely avoided conventional artistic training, instead preferring anatomical studies at the École des Beaux-Arts, making copies in the Louvre and painting alone in his studio. His interest in grand heroic themes and classical imagery led Puvis to undertake mural painting, at that time considered the supreme ambition for all serious Realist painters.

Throughout his ensuing four-decade career Puvis consistently endeavoured to refine a classicized and highly decorative aesthetic appropriate to fine mural painting.

The exhibition is curated by art historian and former National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa curator Louise d’Argencourt and Bertrand Puvis de Chavannes.