Hello and welcome to Insider Insights. I'm Emma Wegner, Associate Educator in
Public Programs and Creative Practice at The Met. While the Museum is temporarily closed,
we're providing closer looks at objects from the collection and
exhibitions with Met experts. We hope you'll continue to join us as we debut
each new program in the series.
Today, we're joined by my colleague Alison Hokanson,
Associate Curator in the Department of European Paintings, who is
going to discuss "Sleep" a painting by the 19th century artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.
One of Puvis' favorite compositions, "Sleep" evokes fragile beauty of repose
and togetherness. Alison thank you so much for being with us today.
Thank You Emma and thank you everyone for joining me today.
As Emma mentioned, the painting that I wanted to share with you is titled "Sleep."
I've been thinking a lot about it recently and not just because it depicts
one of my most cherished activities as a parent of young children, although that is true.
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This painting was made around 150 years ago, between about 1867 and 1870 in France.
As Emma said, it was painted by the artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes,
often simply called Puvis.
And I want to start this talk by telling you a little bit about him
because it helps explain the painting.
Puvis was one of the most celebrated painters of his time in France
and also one of the most singular.
He took as inspiration the art and cultural ideals of classical antiquity,
primarily ancient Greece and developed a highly individual approach
centered on the qualities of purity, harmony, and serenity.
In terms of subject matter, this is an art that seeks to rise above everyday realities
to evoke higher ideals, to offer a poetic vision of the past and the present.
The style is restrained and simplified to a degree that was highly original in Puvis' time
and for many of his viewers, revelatory.
He was unusual in that he built his career in the tradition-minded state sanctioned art world.
But he was also a touchstone for the younger artistic vanguard artists
like the French painter Paul Gauguin
who quoted Puvis' painting "Hope" in his still life of 1901.
The Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler, the American Arthur B. Davies,
and even Pablo Picasso.
Vincent van Gogh beautifully expressed his admiration for Puvis in a letter describing the
composition "Between Art and Nature." A version of which is now in The Met.
Van Gogh praised the painting's color and it's depiction of, in Van Gogh's words,
"All humanity, all nature simplified." Van Gogh went on to write,
"By looking at it for along time, one would think one was present at an inevitable, but benevolent
rebirth of all things that one might have believed in. That one might have desired.
A strange and happy meeting of the very distant days of antiquity with raw modernity."
And I think what van Gogh's writing illuminates is the way in which Puvis' paintings
resonated with his audience not only on a visual level, but also in terms of their meaning
and in terms of the emotions, the states of minds that they created.
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You might wonder given how respected Puvis was in his time,
why he's not better known today. And one of the reasons is that Puvis made
his reputation with monumental murals for public buildings in France
which obviously don't travel and which are hard to capture in photographs.
In the United States, the only example of Puvis' mural work is the staircase
in the Boston Public Library.
Puvis did create smaller replicas of his murals
such as this painting, and independent easel paintings, such as "Sleep."
But it can be difficult, looking at those works, to get a full sense
of his ambitions and his accomplishments.
Another reason that I think Puvis is not more widely appreciated,
is that much of his work
invokes a past, a symbolic language, a set of values and beliefs that can seem
quite distant from our own. We are not necessarily coming from a time,
from places, from cultures with a profound investment in or a profound
identification with the distant past of classical antiquity. And that can make it
hard to appreciate what seemed so vital and so engaging in Puvis' work.
On a personal level, I find that for me it requires patience and close looking and
I'm hoping to do a little bit of that with you today.
The Met's version of "Sleep" is a replica about 1/6 the size of a monumental painting
now in the Palais de Beaux-Arts in Lille.
Puvis described that painting as his favorite work and
considered it to be exemplary of his approach. He associated the composition
with an excerpt from the Aeneid written by the ancient Roman poet Virgil in the
1st century BC and that excerpt is inscribed in the original Latin on a
preparatory sketch for the Lille painting that's now in The Met's collection.
It reads, an approximate translation, "It was the hour when the first rest of weary
mortals begins." In Virgil's story, this line refers to a defining moment when
the citizens of Troy are asleep thinking themselves safe from their enemies
the Greeks and spared from war.
But in fact, the Greeks are about to emerge from hiding, storm the city and slaughter the Trojans.
So what this excerpt refers to, what it's about, is a sense of false security.
The Trojans tragic unawareness of the precariousness of their situation.
Puvis does not illustrate Virgil's text. Rather he takes a poetic cue from that single line.
"It was the hour when the first rest of weary mortals begins" and he shifts
the context away from violence, from turmoil and war to something much more
peaceful which is rest after harvesting. Cued by the scythe at right, by the
sheaves of meat, by the sacks of grain. This is an idyllic scene people are asleep,
out of doors, under a beautiful moon. There's a sense of being at one with nature.
Which is amplified by how the contours of their bodies echo the landscape.
For example, the way in which the gesture of the mother holding her
sleeping child is mimicked by the curvature of the tree branches
uh, enfolding the sleeping figures on the ground.
Or the way in which the contours
of the figure's body - sleeping figure's body in the foreground, um, mimic the angle of the land.
The atmosphere of calm and of stillness is heightened in The Met version
by the muted colors, by the softening of detail, and by the flattening of depth
which creates the effect of nighttime perception of things seen in a dream state.
And for me, there's lots to admire in this painting.
The tactile quality of the moonlight as it falls over the figures. The rhythmic
choreography of the way in which they are arranged in groups
and alone, draped and undraped, shown from the front, from the side, from the back.
The way in which they mirror each other, this group of reclining sleeping figures
leaning away to the left, or the two sleeping figures flanking
the man at right. What I most respond to right now is the sense of vulnerability
of how unprotected and exposed these people are. They are literally naked or
something quite close to it. I also respond to this depiction of
togetherness, of mutual dependence, of trust of the physical proximity among
people of all ages which is encapsulated in the infolding gestures of the mother
holding her child at right of the sleeping couple. Or -
here in this group of figures cuddled up together.
For me, this painting resonates as an evocation of the human need
for respite, for contact, and for community and that's all the more moving,
all the more poignant, because this scene is bracketed by symbols of mortality.
At the right, there is the scythe which is traditionally associated often with death
and on the left, there are the embers glowing under the tipped brazier
juxtaposed with the moonlight, which is a common emblem in 19th century art
for the transience and insignificance of human life
amid the eternal grandeur of nature.
And so we come full circle in a way, back to the text by Virgil.
This is a moment of calm, of intimacy, and of rest that comes with an appreciation,
an acknowledgement of our own fragility, our own frailty.
And to me, that makes this moment all the more precious and all the more beautiful.
So I will leave you there. I will say thank you, again.
I hope that you will join us for future episodes
and in the meantime, be well, be healthy and stay safe.
Thank you.