Hope

In May 1872, when this subject went up at the Salon in Paris, France had lost a war with Prussia, lived through the four-month siege of its capital, and seen the Commune put down in street fighting. Puvis de Chavannes answered with the plainest image he could find. The Salon picture, now in Baltimore, shows Hope as a girl in a white dress. This smaller version, painted at about the same time, leaves her bare and seats her on a white cloth in a scarred field. Behind her stand the walls of a ruined building, and across the grass a few makeshift wooden crosses mark graves. She holds out a small green sprig. The collector Henri Rouart, a close friend of Degas, owned the canvas for 25 years, and the French state bought it at his sale in 1912.