Die liebliche Landschaft

Puvis de Chavannes showed this at the Paris Salon of 1882, a pale idyll of young women and children resting on a headland above a calm sea, a few sailboats out on the water. It was made for a friend. The portraitist Leon Bonnat wanted something for the staircase of his townhouse on the rue de Bassano in Paris, and the two men traded canvases as a token of friendship, Puvis giving this dream of an untroubled country and Bonnat giving a portrait in return. Nothing in it belongs to any real place or year, and that was the point. While Paris filled with railways and iron, Puvis painted flat, quiet, faintly faded scenes that looked centuries old, and a younger generation, Seurat and Gauguin among them, watched closely. It hangs now in Bonnat's own museum in Bayonne.