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Your galleryThe Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and the Muses
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Compare the standing and seated figures with the two pale figures floating overhead. How do the repeated light shapes guide you through the grove?
This canvas is a smaller version of Puvis’s mural for the staircase of Lyon’s Musée des Beaux-Arts. Figures representing architecture, painting, and sculpture gather with the nine Muses in an imagined classical landscape. Pale colors and shallow space connect the scene to wall painting, even though this particular work is oil on canvas.
Oil on canvas · 93 × 231 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Symbolism
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Details and source
- Museum title
- The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and the Muses
- Artist
- Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (French, 1824–1898)
- Date
- 1884–89
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 93 × 231 cm (36 7/16 × 90 15/16 in.); Framed: 124.5 × 243.8 × 19.1 cm (49 × 96 × 7 1/2 in.)
- Credit line
- Potter Palmer Collection
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.