Cleveland Museum of Art

Summer

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Date

1891

Medium

oil on fabric

Culture

France, 19th century

Department

Modern European Painting and Sculpture

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

This painting is a smaller version of a mural on the same subject painted for the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, which has a companion mural titled Winter . A writer at the time described Summer as "filled with joy, happiness, rest, and the apotheosis of life." Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, and Pablo Picasso were among the many modernists influenced by Puvis de Chavannes’s dreamlike themes and anti-naturalistic style of simplified, flattened forms. Puvis de Chavannes was considered one of the foremost artists in France in the second half of the 1800, and was particularly admired for his murals. This painting is a version of a mural he painted in 1889, which was particularly difficult because the wall had a door in the middle.

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