Saint Genevieve as a Child in Prayer

In 1874 the French state hired about a dozen painters to decorate the domed building above the Latin Quarter that Paris now calls the Panthéon. At the time it was a working church dedicated to Sainte Geneviève, in the old accounts a shepherd girl from Nanterre who became the patron saint of the city. Puvis de Chavannes was given her childhood, and this tall canvas is one of the oil studies he made for murals several metres high, finished around 1877. He kept the scene plain: the girl kneeling in prayer among sheep, a few Gauls behind her staring in astonishment. That was the contrast he described wanting, something almost supernatural set beside ordinary people gaping at it. The building was secularised again 11 years after the commission, and Geneviève's life stayed on its walls.