Artwork Page for Summer

Details / Information for Summer

Summer

1891

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

(French, 1824–1898)
Culture
France, 19th century
Medium
oil on fabric
Measurements
Framed: 189.5 x 270.5 x 14.6 cm (74 5/8 x 106 1/2 x 5 3/4 in.); Unframed: 149.6 x 232.4 cm (58 7/8 x 91 1/2 in.)
Credit Line
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade 1916.1056
Public Domain
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Location
222 Impressionism & Post-Impressionism
Print
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Did You Know?

Puvis de Chavannes was considered one of the foremost artists in France in the second half of the 1800, and was particularly admired for his murals. This painting is a version of a mural he painted in 1889, which was particularly difficult because the wall had a door in the middle.

Description

This painting is a smaller version of a mural on the same subject painted for the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, which has a companion mural titled Winter. A writer at the time described Summer as "filled with joy, happiness, rest, and the apotheosis of life." Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, and Pablo Picasso were among the many modernists influenced by Puvis de Chavannes’s dreamlike themes and anti-naturalistic style of simplified, flattened forms.
A horizontally oriented oil painting in flat swathes of color depicts nude people with light skin tone in solid, light-blue water and on a green bank with thin, gray trees and dense, dark green shrubbery. Two women dry off with white towels on the bank, one climbs out of the water, and another lies on the grass. Standing in the water, a woman holds the wrists of a squirming child. In the back left, a nude person stands on a rowboat, another, clothed, is seated.

Summer

1891

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

(French, 1824–1898)
France, 19th century

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