+ Expand

Artist or Maker: Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (French, 1824-1898)

+ Expand

Description: La Fantaisie (Fantasy)
signed 'P. Puvis de Chavannes' (lower left)
oil on canvas
18 3/4 x 12 3/8 in. (47.5 x 31.5 cm.)
Painted circa 1886-1887.

+ Expand

Provenance: [Presumably] Auguste Toulmouche (1829-1890), Paris, 1887.
with Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, 1899.
with Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 1954, no. 55.
with Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1954, no. 40.
Acquired from the abovee in 1955 by Emil G. Bührle; thence by descent to the present owner.

+ Expand

Exhibited: Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Exposition de Tableaux, Pastels, Dessins par M. Puvis de Chavannes, 20 November-20 December 1887, no. 24 (Durand-Ruel Archive, no. 1358, illus. 15611).
Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Tableaux, Esquisses et Dessins de Puvis de Chavannes, June-July 1899, no. 25.
Paris, Société de Salon d'Automne, Catalogue des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, dessin, gravure, architecture et art décoratif exposés au Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées, 15 October-15 November 1904, no. 2 or no. 6 (two versions exhibited).
London, Marlborough Fine Art, French Masters of the 19th and 20th Centuries, October-November 1954, no. 40.
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Sammlung Emil G. Bührle, June-September 1958, no. 135.

+ Expand

Published: J. Buisson, 'Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, souvenirs intimes', Gazette des Beaux-Arts, no. 3, XXII September 1899, 223 (illustrated, or no. 139).
A. Brown Price, Puvis de Chavannes: A Study of the Easel Paintings and a Catalogue of the Painted Work, Ph.D dissertation, (Yale Univeristy, 1972), pp. 346-347, 355.
M.-C. Boucher, 'La Décoration de Puvis de Chavannes pour l'Hôtel Vignon', La Revue du Louvre et des Musées de France, XXVIII, no. 2, 1978, 98-106.
A. Brown, et al., Exhibition catalogue, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 25 February-29 May 1994, pp. 108-115.

+ Expand

Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A EUROPEAN COLLECTOR

This composition by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes - a nude nymph using a flowery vine to lasso a winged horse or Pegasus (emblematic of fantasy or the imagination) and a youth or Cupid fashioning a wreath in a verdant wooded landscape bounded by high cliffs - epitomises the kind of classicizing Arcadian motif with which he is most closely associated. As he began to attain fame in the 1860s, Puvis initiated the practise of executing reduced versions after his own most important mural paintings, so they might in their variant versions be exhibited. Though his mural cycles for public buildings in France are best known, in this instance he revisited a large 8 1/2 by almost 5 feet wide (or 263.7 x 148.6 cm,) 1866 wall painting La Fantaisie (Fantasy) (now Ohara Museum, Kurashiki, Japan: Fig. 1), one of the quartet also including La Vigilance, Le Recueillement, and L'Histoire (Vigilance, Meditation and History currently at the Musée d'Orsay). These works comprised his only commission for a private residence, the Paris town house of the distinguished sculptor Noëmie Cadiot, who signed her novels, articles and art criticism Claude Vignon and championed Puvis's works.

By the 1880s when Puvis's importance was such that there was a considerable demand for his work, he produced a number of so-called 'reductions' of his finest previous work. These were exhibited by the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris and sold to eagerly awaiting collectors. Puvis almost certainly executed the present canvas expressly for his important 1887 retrospective there, its domestic scale calculated to attract a collector. This fine painting dated here circa 1886-1887 varies considerably from its prototype of some twenty years earlier. While retaining the imagery of a seated muse (in a pose reminiscent of Ingres's Valpinçon bather) and an idyllic setting, the marked difference in manner and technique between the two works provides a superb gauge of Puvis's aesthetic development and the distance toward modernism that the had travelled. When the earlier painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1866, its blue, green, and blond colour casts were much remarked on and critics searched for how to explain its unusual and even shocking, if muted, tonalities, comparing them to those of majolica. In this independent painting, Puvis, free to persue any colour (not the harmonies of the Vignon ensemble), was no less inventive: he created a milk-white Pegasus and seated his pale muse with flamboyantly pink-red hair on a length of vibrant pink drapery. While his figures retain the sophisticated sense of colour, stylistic mannerisms, elongated proportions and tapered limbs redolent of the Fontainebleau school, they also display a pretty pertness reminiscent of Puvis's rococo-like small decorative paintings of the mid-1860s. In contrast to the relative voluptuousness of the figures in the earlier work, the later figures are pared down, simplified, and more severe. Pictorial elements are condensed and the technique, looser. The drily scumbled, chalkier, and more opaque surfaces serve to flatten images and spaces.

Puvis evidently favoured this composition: he made at least five fully-realised drawings of it, several of which are presentation pieces with dedications. A beautiful pen and ink drawing was the source for a heliogravure by A. Durand reproduced in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts on 1 June 1866.

This version of Fantasy will be included in this author's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Puvis de Chavanne's painted work which, together with her monograph on the artist is projected for publication by Yale University Press in the Spring of 2005.

Copyright: Aimée Brown Price, 2004.

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium