The work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) was often exhibited and hugely admired during the nineteenth century. Internationally famous as the author of great mural cycles for public buildings - the city halls of Paris and Poitiers; museums at Amiens, Marseilles, Lyons, and Rouen; the great amphitheatre at the Sorbonne and two campaigns at what was then the Church of Sainte Geneviève in Paris (that we now know as the Panthéon); and his only murals outside of France, at the Boston Public Library - he is most closely associated with wonderful Arcadian pastorals. Yet, over a fifty-year career, 1848 to 1898, he produced a great many different kinds of work, from portraiture to bleak and melancholic religious painting to inventive allegories and informal still lifes. His works on paper include fresh watercolors and charming gouaches and pastels, with drawings that range from small fingernail sketches to beautifully finished large figure sheets, to wicked caricatures. Most important to a generation of younger artists was his development, in conjunction with his great mural paintings, of a special decorative aesthetic that would have significant impact on their own vision. This called for renewed consideration of the two-dimensionality of compositions, attentiveness to colors keyed to each other and the architectural surrounds, and simplified, flattened forms to allow for ready pictorial legibility.