1875
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Study for the Mother in The Fisherman's Family is a 1875 by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a woman sitting sideways on a stool, one breast bare, her face turned away. This is a quick sketch Puvis made to plan the mother in a larger painting. He changed his mind later—covering more of her body in the final work. The same pose shows up in an earlier painting called *Summer*, which the French government bought. If you like this quiet, careful style, look up sfumato.
This study relates to the figure of the mother in Pierre Puvis de Chavannes's The Fisherman's Family , a painting first shown at the 1875 Paris Salon, and which the artist also painted in reduced scale in 1887. While Puvis represented his female figure completely nude in the study, in the painting he left bare just a breast, shoulder, and arm. The artist derived the mother figure seen in this drawing from an earlier canvas, Summer , purchased by the French state at the 1873 Salon. In this study, the figure retains some naturalistic features smoothed away in the later paintings, as seen in her…
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes also worked out the composition of the female figure seen in this drawing through a more developed study now in the collection of the Musée Saint-Nazaire in Bourbon-Lancy, France.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (French pronunciation: ; 14 December 1824 – 24 October 1898) was a French painter known for his mural painting, who came to be known as "the painter for France".
See the richer artist page
