“Puvis overwhelms me with his talent and experience which I lack,” despaired Paul Gauguin, apropos of the canonical French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), in an 1899 letter to the critic André Fontainas. A stylistic anomaly, at once tethered to the establishment as France’s foremost mural painter of public buildings, while unattached to the major artistic currents of his time, Puvis attained an unusual critical consensus from sometimes vitriolically opposed modernists and conservatives. In an 1895 letter to Gauguin, the dramatist August Strindberg declared: “One name was pronounced by all with admiration, that of Puvis de Chavannes. He stood quite alone, like a contradiction, painting with a believing soul, even while he took a passing notice of the taste of his contemporaries for allusion.”
