Summer (1891): Art, History and Details

Summer (1891) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (French, 1824–1898).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

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.

Object facts

• Title: Summer
• Date: 1891
• Creator attribution: Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (French, 1824–1898)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 189.5 x 270.5 x 14.6 cm (74 5/8 x 106 1/2 x 5 3/4 in.); Unframed: 149.6 x 232.4 cm (58 7/8 x 91 1/2 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1916.1056

A detail from the museum

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.

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade

Further reading listed by the museum

• Godet, Pierre. "Puvis de Chavannes et la Peinture d'Aujourd'hui." Art Decoratif (January, 1912): 43.
• Warner, Langdon. "The Wade Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art IV, no. 1 (January, 1917): 3-4.
• "The Wade Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 1 (1917): 3-12.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.