“LE REPOS”
(Amiens)
Consecration, and the Miracles of the Saint; and there are no more beautiful expressions of religious art in the contemporaneous French school.
The figures are strong, simple, natural. The background is a summer landscape, of exquisite loveliness. In the foreground are the rugged, rustic peasants, the pastoral life, and the pure figure of the child Geneviève. The atmosphere is tender, the composition dignified and impressive, and the scenes are pervaded with peace. These pastoral paintings were a new era in the school of plein air. One does not ask if the setting is an anachronism. Puvis de Chavannes, to aid him in the production of this masterpiece, read no histories, studied no text-books regarding the costumes and manners of the times of the saint. He went to the plain of Nanterre, absorbed himself in the atmosphere of the country around Paris. The Seine and Mont Valérien became his background and setting. Then he shut himself in his studio at Neuilly, where Ste. Geneviève and her people appeared to him as he painted them on the Panthéon walls. If these pictures suggest the Florentine renaissance, it is because the monastic religious, the naive simplicity, are sympathetic with the spirit of the Italian painters. The frescoes are full of a fine effulgence, animated by a flame as mysterious as that in a virgin’s lamp before a dim mediæval shrine. He received the order in 1883 to decorate the staircase in the Palais des Arts at Lyons. He painted the Bois Sacré and the symbolic figures of the Rhône and the Saône. For this work he received the sum of 40,000 francs. His expenses were 10,000, and the fresco took him three years to paint, making about 6000 francs that he was paid for these splendid works of art—the price that a modern portrait-painter of distinction would refuse for a picture of one of the beau-monde. This order completed, the painter looked and waited in vain for new walls and decorations. “For me,” he said, “the horizon seems to close down upon the future: there remains nothing for me to do but to battle against indolence; but if I can inspire youth with the example of a life of labour, not altogether fruitless, I shall have lived to some purpose.” And again: “They come slowly,” he said, “these vast spaces whereon I may express myself with broad, free sweep.” When he first received the order to decorate the hemicycle of the Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne at a price of 35,000 francs, he refused, and the committee received a letter of acceptance from him the next day.
