Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (born December 14, 1824) was born in Lyon, France. Puvis was the leading French mural painter of the later 19th century. His teachers included Eugène Delacroix and Thomas Couture. He was much admired by a diverse group of critics and artists, including Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire. Puvis was largely independent of the major artistic currents of his time. Although the artist exhibited regularly from the 1860s on at the Paris Salons, he is best remembered for the huge canvases he painted for the walls of public buildings throughout France including city halls and other places. In 1861 he began an important series of paintings which took him more than 20 years. The series became part of the decorative scheme for the museum at Amiens.
Puvis developed a unique technique characterized by rhythmic lines, simplified forms, and flat, pale, frescolike coloring for idealizations of themes from antiquity and for allegorical pieces. Among his other major commissions is a series of panels are those illustrating the life of St. Geneviève. They were done in the Panthéon, Paris. The work begun in 1876 and was completed by his students after his death. He died in October 24, 1898 in Paris, France. He’s remembered for the other important Paris murals he did in the Hôtel de Ville and the Sorbonne. He also painted the staircase of the public library at Boston, a project that begun in 1894 and ended in 1898. His art was and still is great demand all over the world. They are highly priced by many discerning collectors.
