 |
| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes The Bathers (study for painting) ca. 1890 drawing Harvard Art Museums |
 |
| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes The Bathers ca. 1890 oil on canvas Art Gallery of Ontario |
 |
| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Bather (study for painting) ca. 1891 drawing Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
 |
| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Bathers 1891 oil on canvas Cleveland Museum of Art (Ohio) |
 |
| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Bathers before 1898 watercolor Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"We say at times that something may survive of a man after his death, if the man was an artist and took a certain amount of pains with his work."
– Marcel Proust, from Albertine Disparue (1925), translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff as The Sweet Cheat Gone (1930)
"People sometimes say that something of a person may live on after their death, if that person was an artist and placed something of himself in his work."
– Marcel Proust, from Albertine Disparue (1925), translated by Peter Collier as The Fugitive (2002)
(The more recent translator, Peter Collier, in the passage directly above, substitutes the gender-neutral person for Scott Moncrieff's man and then uses the plural pronoun their to reference this singular individual, following a widespread 21st-century strategy to work around the fact that our English-speaking ancestors did not provide us with a gender-neutral singular pronoun in the third person (except for it and its, which could have been extended more rationally to cover gender-neutral persons without violating number – yet it seems that no language-correcting contemporary human could bear to see itself mingled with the inanimate universe, while content enough to see its singular self confounded with a crowd). In any case, Collier throws up the game entirely in the second half of the sentence – referring for a second time to this so-called person and then suddenly switching to the gender-specific and singular himself and his which he was at such awkward pains to avoid only a few words back. The only consistent choice he has given himself at this point is to use themselves and their in reference to his person and artist – or else create the semantic gibberish that he has put on the page and attributed to Proust.)
 |
| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Le Sommeil (study for painting) ca. 1867 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
 |
| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Le Sommeil 1867 oil on canvas Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille |
 |
| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Le Sommeil (sketch for painting) ca. 1867 oil on canvas Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille |
 |
| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes The Toilette (sketch for painting) ca. 1883 oil on board National Gallery, London |
 |
| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes The Toilette 1883 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
 |
| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes The Toilette 1895 lithograph Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
 |
| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Fisherman's Family (study for painting) ca. 1883 drawing Art Institute of Chicago |
 |
| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Fisherman's Family 1887 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago |
 |
| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Fisherman's Family ca. 1883 watercolor Art Institute of Chicago |