Self-Portrait

By 1887 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was the man decorating France. His large, pale wall paintings, calm figures in flat fresco-like colour, were going up in the Pantheon in Paris, in the Sorbonne, and in the museums and town halls of Lyon and Amiens. He was in his early sixties and near the height of his fame when he painted this self-portrait. What carried his influence beyond the official commissions was the younger painters who studied him closely. Seurat, Gauguin, and later Matisse and Picasso all took something from his simplified forms and quiet, rhythmic design. His mural cycle on the life of Saint Genevieve for the Pantheon, begun in 1876, was still unfinished when he died in 1898 and was completed by his pupils.