Portrait of Puvis de Chavannes
1897
Medium
Lithograph in black on China paper laid down on heavy buff wove paper
Dimensions
Image: 54.6 × 39.8 cm (21 1/2 × 15 11/16 in.); Sheet: 66 × 48 cm (26 × 18 15/16 in.)
Classification
lithograph
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
39547
Art Historical Context
In the Prints and Drawings department of the Art Institute of Chicago resides Eugène Carrière's *Portrait of Puvis de Chavannes* (1897), a striking lithograph that captures the essence of late 19th-century French artistic circles. Carrière, a master of Symbolist portraiture, depicts Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, the revered muralist and Symbolist painter whose dreamlike wall decorations adorned public buildings across France. Created just a year before Puvis's death, this work reflects the mutual admiration between two giants of the fin-de-siècle art world, where Symbolism emphasized mood and mys...
About the Artist
Eugène Carrière
Eugène Carrière (1849–1906) was a French painter whose deeply personal and atmospheric canvases made him one of the most distinctive voices of the Symbolist generation. Born in Gournay-sur-Marne, Carrière trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Alexandre Cabanel, though he quickly moved beyond the academic conventions he encountered there, forging an intensely individual manner that owe...