ABSTRACT
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was once a painter of formidable reputation and influence. For Puvis's was a sensibility of extraordinary purity and conviction. The compulsion to record the raw optical data that impinges on the retina of the eye—the mania for exactitude that so absorbed the Impressionists—interested him not in the least. What Puvis sought was an intensity—a spiritual intensity for which the subtlest visual equivalents had to be found—without vividness or verisimilitude. The truth is, Puvis's imagery is as shorn of drama as his palette. Puvis, too, had his favored iconography—a timeless, Arcadian world of nymphs without satyrs, a poetic evocation of classical Greece minus all conflict and all appetite and the tragedies these engender. There are also a great many smaller paintings and drawings as well as studies for the large decorative works that were Puvis's particular preoccupation.
