CHAVANNES, [Pierre-Cécile] Puvis de, born Pierre-Cécile Puvis (1824-1898).
Autograph Letter Signed, to “Monsieur Thiebault-Sisson au Journal Le Temps.”
CHAVANNES, [Pierre-Cécile] Puvis de, born Pierre-Cécile Puvis (1824-1898).
Autograph Letter Signed, to “Monsieur Thiebault-Sisson au Journal Le Temps.”
A brief note, written a year before his death, regretting his inability to help, owing to his own uselessness in matters of business, and his wife’s illness. He concludes “m’apporterai a la reunion qu’un esprite rebelle et preoccupée – excusez moi et croyez surtout a mon bien sincere attachement”, roughly translated as “I would bring to the meeting only a troublemaking and detached attitude. Excuse me and believe above all in my deep fondness.”
He may have been slightly exaggerating in describing Maria Cantacuzenes as his wife, as it is believed they only married in 1898, in which year they both also died.
The critic Sisson had tirelessly championed Chavannes’s work. Chavannes’s symbolist art influenced the modernists to a considerable extent, with their remarkable and unsettling transpositions of classical motifs.
