On October 28, 2024, La Poste issued a stamp from the artistic series illustrated by a work by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes on the occasion of the bicentenary of his birth.
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was born in Lyon in 1824, to a father who was a mining engineer and a mother who came from a family from Lyon. During his youth, not yet thinking of a career as an artist, he prepared for the entrance exam to the École Polytechnique but his fragile health forced him to give up his studies.
After a trip to Italy in 1846, he decided to train as a painter and moved to Paris, where he joined, each time briefly, the prestigious studios of Henry Scheffer, Eugène Delacroix and Thomas Couture. Despite a difficult start, his submissions to the Salons being all refused until 1858, he settled in a studio on Place Pigalle. At the same time, he discovered mural decoration by painting panels for his brother's country house in Saône-et-Loire.
In 1859, he finally attracted the attention of critics with Un retour de chasse, exhibited at the Salon. Two years later, the State purchased Concordia, a monumental composition now held at the Amiens Museum with its counterpart donated by the artist, Bellum. Once he had gained official recognition, he accumulated honours and commissions. He distinguished himself in the creation of large mural decorations, common under the Third Republic, to adorn the museums of Amiens, Marseille and Rouen, the town hall of Poitiers and then that of Paris, and the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne. He also painted canvases for the Panthéon.
In 1883, the City of Lyon asked him to decorate the new monumental staircase of the Palais des Arts. The artist painted Le Bois sacré cher aux Arts et aux Muses, a landscape bathed in evening light populated with idealized figures. In matte tones reminiscent of the art of fresco painting, which he had admired in Italy, he represents the golden age of pagan antiquity, on the one hand, and modern Christian times, on the other. These compositions give off an impression of serenity and suspended time. Shortly before his death, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes married the woman who had become his muse, Marie Cantacuzène, a Romanian princess he had met years earlier in Théodore Chassériau's studio.
A solitary by nature, the artist remained independent, did not belong to any school, but his synthetic style, later described as symbolist, inspired many artists.
