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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Figure Study ca. 1861 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Two Figures ca. 1861 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Group of Figures ca. 1862-63 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Group of Figures ca. 1862-63 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Group of Figures ca. 1862-63 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Figure Study for Supplicant ca. 1874 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Figure Study for Supplicant ca. 1874 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Man carrying Youth ca. 1874-75 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Figure Study ca. 1875 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Figure with Javelin ca. 1878-80 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Seated Figure ca. 1878-80 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Figure Study ca. 1886-89 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Figure Study ca. 1887-92 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Figure Study ca. 1887-92 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Figure Study ca. 1892-94 drawing Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
"Son of a well-to-do engineer, Puvis decided late on his art career when illness and a visit to Italy led him to abandon engineering studies for painting. He studied in Paris from 1846 on, under Henri Scheffer, Couture and Delacroix. Recognition came slowly but then warmly. He began painting murals (usually on canvas for fixing to walls) in 1861-65 with a cycle of allegories in the Musée de Picardie in Amiens. As his style matured what characterized them was their calm and harmony, arrived at through careful construction by means of geometrical division and the use of large areas of gentle, more or less flat colour. He insisted on finding his own themes for these works while respecting their location, working his compositions up from small drawn and painted studies to full-size cartoons. . . . [Puvis de Chavannes] was widely respected and influenced avant-garde painters such as Seurat, Cézanne, Hodler and later, Picasso and de Chirico, yet he was largely forgotten in the 20th century until recent studies and exhibitions confirmed his achievement."
– Erika Langmuir and Norbert Lynton, Yale Dictionary of Art and Artists (2000)