PIERRE PUVIS DE CHAVANNES

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824 -- 98) was for a long time the most celebrated painter of 19th-century France. His work was everywhere, commissioned as he was to add visual life to the Pantheon, the Sorbonne, and quite a bit of the rest of Paris as well. Time, however, turned Puvis into somewhat of a Salieri -- later generations dismissed him for a lack of originality and for being, essentially, a court painter whose large allegorical murals catered to the pretensions of a rising middle-class and its attendant vulgarity. But in the spirit of everything old being new again, Puvis is garnering a second glance, most notably in an exhibition, curated by Price, at the Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh in Amsterdam, to which this volume is a companion.