The Summer
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres
The Summer is an 1873 painting by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres. It shows figures posed with the flattened, statuesque calm that runs through his work: simplified contours, a shallow sense of depth, and a single dominant tone holding the whole surface together[1]. Puvis reused this device across his career, and the poses of the young man and woman in this canvas reappeared over a decade later in his 1887 painting The Fisherman's Family, evidence of how closely his easel paintings and his larger mural schemes fed each other[1]. He trained under Eugène Delacroix and Thomas Couture before turning to the large-scale decorative commissions, among them cycles for the Panthéon and the Sorbonne in Paris and the Musée de Picardie in Amiens, that made his name[2]. Critics of his own day sometimes complained that his colour was too pale, but his skies carry an intense, luminous blue set against soft greens, a use of light that lets his frescoes seem to grow out of the wall rather than sit on top of it[2]. Never a formal member of the Symbolist group, Puvis was nonetheless treated as its unofficial elder statesman, admired by poets Stéphane Mallarmé and Alfred de Jarry and by the Nabis painter Maurice Denis[2]. His rigid profiles and archaic, bas-relief simplicity, worked out across decades of public commissions, would go on to shape painters who had little else in common with him.
Where it is held
Held at Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres.
The painting is held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres.
A single tone holding the picture together
By the 1870s Puvis had settled on a working method he would use for the rest of his career: building a composition around one dominant colour tone rather than the fuller palette his Impressionist contemporaries were exploring at the same moment[1]. The Summer, painted in 1873, is an early instance of this approach, which he pushed further in the following decade in paintings such as The Poor Fisherman[1]. The effect flattens the picture, favouring a high horizon line and a shallow, decorative space over illusionistic depth, closer in spirit to a fresco than to a framed easel painting[1]. Puvis wanted his canvases to read as durable stand-ins for wall paintings, carrying the same two-dimensional discipline even when they were never meant for a wall at all[1].
From easel painting to mural, and back again
Puvis rarely treated his smaller paintings and his large decorative commissions as separate bodies of work. Figures and poses migrate between them. The young man and woman in The Summer reappear, reworked, in The Fisherman's Family of 1887, a canvas Puvis based on an earlier composition of his own from 1875[1]. This habit of quotation was not laziness but a working method: Puvis treated a successful pose as a resource to be returned to, refined and set into a new arrangement, the way a muralist reuses a cartoon[1]. It reflects the scale of ambition behind even his smaller pictures, each one built with the same compositional discipline he brought to a wall forty feet long.
Training and the turn to mural painting
Puvis studied under Eugène Delacroix and Thomas Couture before deciding to devote himself fully to painting[2]. His early submissions to the Salon met repeated rejection, and it was not through his cabinet-sized pictures that he found his reputation, but through the public fresco commissions he began to secure from the 1850s onward, for the Musée de Picardie in Amiens and later for the Panthéon and the Sorbonne in Paris[2]. These vast wall schemes let him work at a scale that suited his flattened, timeless figures, and it was through them, not his easel paintings, that the wider public came to know his name[2].
Common questions
What is Puvis de Chavannes' The Summer about?
It is an 1873 painting built around Puvis's characteristic flattened, statuesque figures and a single dominant colour tone, a compositional device he would return to and intensify across the rest of his career[1].
Where is The Summer displayed?
The painting is held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres.
Was Puvis de Chavannes a Symbolist painter?
He never formally joined the Symbolist movement, but Symbolist poets and painters, including Mallarmé, Jarry and Maurice Denis, treated him as an unofficial forerunner of their circle[3].
Did Puvis de Chavannes reuse compositions from his paintings?
Yes. He borrowed the poses of the two figures in The Summer for his later canvas The Fisherman's Family of 1887, a habit consistent with how he moved ideas between his easel paintings and his large mural commissions[1].
Sources
Editorial draws on the following references, verified against the museum and public-domain image record for this work.
- [1] book Post-impressionism : cross-currents in European painting Used for: this artwork.
- [2] book Nathalia Brodskaya, Symbolism Used for: this artwork.
- [3] book Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, 1980 Used for: this artwork.
- [4] book Richard Shiff, Cezanne and the end of impressionism : a study of the theory, technique, and critical evaluation of modern art Used for: this artwork.
Editorial overseen by Solis Prints. Sources verified 2026-09-03. Click a source for details, or hover over [N] in the page above to preview.
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