Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Return From the Hunt or The Boar Hunt, ca. 1859–62

Download PDF
doi: 10.37764/78973.5.530
Artist	Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, French, 1824–1898
Title	Return From the Hunt or The Boar Hunt
Object Date	ca. 1859–62
Alternate and Variant Titles	Le Retour de la Chasse; La Chasse au Sanglier
Medium	Oil on panel
Dimensions (Unframed)	18 1/8 x 14 3/4 in. (46.1 x 37.5 cm)
Signature	Signed lower right: PUVIS DE CHAVANNES.
Credit Line	The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 33-149

Catalogue Entry

curatorial

Citation

Chicago:

Aimée Brown Price, “Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Return From the Hunt or The Boar Hunt, ca. 1859–62,” catalogue entry in French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2025), https://doi.org/10.37764/78973.5.530.5407.

MLA:

Price, Aimée Brown. “Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Return From the Hunt or The Boar Hunt, ca. 1859–62,” catalogue entry. French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2025. doi: 10.37764/78973.5.530.5407.

Return from the Hunt or The Boar Hunt¹Various versions of this painting have been published with somewhat differing titles, even to including or eliminating the French article “le” or “la.” The Musée d’Orsay calls the Salon version of 1859, now in Marseilles, Retour de Chasse (Return from the Hunt), but their own catalogue, Puvis de Chavannes et le musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille (Marseille: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1984), no. 1, p. 52, titles the work Le Retour de la chasse and The Boar Hunt (La Chasse au Sanglier). Following previously published sources, Aimée Brown Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, vol. 2, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Painted Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), no. 95, pp. 68–69, lists the Nelson-Atkins painting as La Chasse au sanglier/ Return from the Hunt or The Boar Hunt. by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes dates from the artist’s first period of activity but already displays the pictorial inventiveness of his mature paintings. Yet unlike his later work, with which he gained international fame in the later nineteenth century, it is neither classicizing in its imagery, a mode most often associated with his public murals, nor does it share the melancholia and decidedly idiosyncratic figural stylizations of his more personal easel paintings (such as The Poor Fisherman, 1881; Musée d’Orsay, Paris).

Return from the Hunt depicts men riding and striding into the compositional space, the first of whom trumpets their success on a ram’s horn while two others carry a deer carcass suspended from a pole, the excitement intensified by yapping dogs. At center, on horseback, a rider in a leopard skin (since antiquity, an apt outfit in art for the hunt), triumphantly sports a boar’s head high atop a stake (possibly his spear). Somewhat more faintly, in the middle distance, more men on horseback bring up the rear. A sense of energy emanates from the poses, the sense of movement, and the drapery that (for propriety’s sake) swirls about the lower limbs of two virtually unclad figures. Even in this early painting, the carefully calibrated construction of figures and spaces that would characterize Puvis’s later work is evident. Here are the beginnings of the coordinated forms, repeated rhythms, and rhyming limbs that lock the elements into an ineluctable compositional whole. A variant version of a subject Puvis had painted earlier, this work, with its adventurous elliptical format and essentially monochromatic blue tonalities, also marks his transition to developing an aesthetic for décorations—of which murals comprise one category—compositions designed to enhance architecture and subsume themselves to a wall. Indeed, décorations (not mere decorations, as the English cognate might suggest) engendered simplified, flattened, transmogrified, and—though not to beg the question—“artful” representations of both the actual and fanciful. Décorations provided an avenue to an aesthetic that differed strikingly from that of traditional easel painting, prefiguring modernism as we know it in Western art.

Fig. 1. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, *The Four Seasons*, 1854–55, oil on canvas, decoration of the dining room at Le Château du Brouchy

The imagery of Return from the Hunt originated in an earlier work by Puvis and is best understood in the context of how he came to this subject matter in the first place. He formulated the scene for a particular purpose: as part of his first mural cycle, which he produced as a still-young artist. Untried in terms of commissions, but ambitious and wanting to do big things, in 1854–55 he executed a series of large oil-on-canvas-covered panels (fresco does not do well in the sometimes-humid French climate) for the spacious dining room of a family château, Le Brouchy (Saône-et-Loire) (Fig. 1).²For a more extensive discussion of the Le Brouchy murals and reproductions, see Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, nos. 48–61, pp. 1:36; 2:34–43. Since 1992, Le Brouchy has been classified as a Monument Historique; see https://association-dartagnan.fr/index.php/publications/15-traditions-bressanes/286-le-chateau-du-brouchy (with several errors, including that Puvis’s paintings there are “fresques” or frescoes) and https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_du_Brouchy. That this was to be part of a larger program—and, most particularly, that it was intended for an elegant locus for eating and drinking—explains the choice of subject matter. Four of the principal murals, including Return from the Hunt, have to do with specific foodstuffs, each presented by way of a biblical narrative and further related to one of the four seasons. While there are overdoor paintings of still lifes, the whole scheme culminates in the largest painting, the preparations for a banquet to celebrate the Return of the Prodigal Son. Enhancing that central work, the canvas dedicated to the season of spring depicts fishing through the miraculous draught of fishes, as told in the Gospels; summer features a wheat harvest, via the story of the gleaners and of Ruth and Boaz; autumn, the vintage and making of wine, leading to the drunkenness of Noah; and winter, represented by the canvas entitled Esau’s Return from the Hunt (Fig. 2), refers to meat, specifically game, and Esau’s desire to receive a blessing from his father, Isaac.³The dimensions of the Le Brouchy mural are 98 x 87 1/2 in. (249 x 222.3 cm). For Puvis’s preliminary oil sketch of 1854, which is 21 7/8 x 18 7/8 in. (55.5 x 48 cm.), see Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, no. 51, pp. 1:36, 57, and 2:35. This last panel became the source for several variant versions, including the markedly different rendition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Fig. 2. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, *Esau’s Return from the Hunt* or *Winter*, 1854–55, oil on canvas, 98 x 87 1/2 in. (249 x 222.3 xm), private collection, Le Brouchy, France

The imagery of Return from the Hunt stems from the Old Testament story of Esau in Genesis 27:3. The pertinent passage recounts how Isaac asked his son Esau to bring him the wild game for which he had a special taste, and to prepare it as savory food so that Isaac might eat before dying and bless Esau before the Lord. Puvis’s painting celebrates the successful mission, with Esau on horseback, the trumpeting figure blowing a ram’s horn (a shofar, again a biblical allusion), and the transport of venison and boar, representing the game coveted by Isaac.⁴In biblical Hebrew, “game” is not what Isaac sought, but “delicacies.” Game, the result of the hunt, is how the term has been translated into English—or “gibier” in French (undoubtedly Puvis’s source). Here this is represented by venison and boar, although in fact boar would have been forbidden food for the family of this Hebrew patriarch.

Fig. 3. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, *Return from the Hunt*, 1859, oil on canvas, 155 1/2 x 116 1/8 in. (395 x 295 cm), Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseille, inv. 214

Eager to be known, Puvis also executed a larger version after his mural (Fig. 3),⁵Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, no. 94, pp. 2:67–8 and for further discussion. which drew favorable criticism at the SalonSalon, the: Exhibitions organized by the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture (Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture) and its successor the Academy of Fine Arts (Académie des Beaux Arts), which took place in Paris from 1667 onward. of 1859, notably from the critic Théophile Gautier.⁶Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, 67 (see under “Sources and Literature”). See also Théophile Gautier, “Exposition de 1859,” Moniteur Universel (June 23, 1859): 721–22. Puvis’s entries to the Salon had been rejected since 1850. Puvis’s donation of this later Return from the Hunt to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles must have been particularly satisfying, and its destination was no fluke, for that museum also housed Peter Paul Rubens’s (Flemish, 1577–1640) The Boar Hunt of about 1615–16.⁷Musée des Beaux Arts, Marseilles, BA103; for an image, see the photo agency of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux et du Grand Palais: https://www.photo.rmn.fr/archive/15-626150-2C6NU0AMVYQ7G.html. Puvis may well have wanted viewers to compare the two and note how he measured up, quite literally: at 155 x 116 1/8 in. (345 x 295 cm), his canvas is even more monumental than that of Rubens (98 7/16 x l25 15/16 in.; 250 x 320 cm).

Fig. 4. Attributed to Félix Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910), after Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, caricature of *Return from the Hunt*, 1859, reproduced in *Journal pour Rire*: *Le Journal Amusant*, no. 185 (July 16, 1859): 5, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Puvis’s canvas was also satirized in one of the canny caricatural drawings that routinely ridiculed works at the Salon (Fig. 4). Such lampoons invariably seized upon and further exaggerated the novel and the unexpected, and their mockery was a sure sign of attention, if not success. This unsigned satire, attributed to Félix Nadar (1820–1910),⁸The caption of this caricature reads: “Je regrette vivement que ce second numéro du Salon ne soit pas enluminé comme le premier cela m’aurait permis de donner un peu de couleur au RETOUR DE CHASSE, où M. Puvis de Chavannes n’en a pas mis du tout” (I deeply regret that this second issue of the Salon is not illuminated like the first, which would have allowed me to add a little color to THE RETURN FROM THE HUNT, where Mr. Puvis de Chavannes did not add any at all). My thanks for the superb documentation files at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for these references and to the staff there for bringing them to my attention. parodied the simplified, repeated shapes in the Marseilles painting. By further reducing and making them into all-but-two-dimensional, geometric abstractions—and so, tellingly, exposing a certain rigidity in their shapes and the rhyming similarities in the disposition of limbs—the caricature, through these metamorphoses (anticipating twentieth-century art), clarifies these stylistic quirks in strong visual terms.⁹Indeed, Ian Kennedy, the former Louis L. and Adelaide C. Ward Curator of European painting and sculpture, noting just those elements that had been satirized, inquired whether the Nelson-Atkins Return from the Hunt might not be a copy, because it was “too wooden and stiff.” Ian Kennedy to the author, November 10, 2004, NAMA curatorial files. Indeed, this characteristic of engineering shapes and spaces typifies the best of Puvis’s work. With this painting that was so artfully designed and skillfully arranged—there are no floating figures or iffiness in placements—Puvis introduced himself to a larger public. He did so not only by giving the work to a public museum but also by further capitalizing on his Salon success by producing an etching after Return from the Hunt and returning to the image once again with his charmingly novel, blue-hued ellipse now at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Fig. 5. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, *Return from the Hunt*, etching on laid paper, second and last state, 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. (31.7 x 24.2 cm), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, département des Estampes et photographie, DC-303 (H)-FOL

The print (Fig. 5) dates from 1862, the year that Puvis was one of the founders of the Société des Aquafortistes (Society of Etchers).¹⁰See the superb analysis by Douglas Druick in Puvis de Chavannes, 1824–1898, exh. cat. (Paris: Éditions des musées nationaux, 1976), no. 33, p. 53–55; also Douglas W. Druick, “Puvis and the Printed Image, 1862–1898,” Nouvelles de l’estampe (1977): 27–35. Druick wonders whether Félix Braquemond might have had a hand in producing the print. Bruno Foucart has questioned whether the print might not have occasioned Puvis’s exploration of and progress toward the simplifications in his technique: changed lighting, modeling reduced to light and dark, and black only in the background, making motifs more distinct and causing the figures to lose relief. Foucart sees a flattening, with everything brought to the frontal plane, that adds to the decorative effect and vigor of the surface. In fact, he wonders whether the etching might not have preceded the Nelson-Atkins painting, contributing to its flattened surface and decorative quality.¹¹Bruno Foucart, in his entry on the print in Puvis de Chavannes: Une voie singulière au siècle de l’Impressionnisme, exh. cat. (Amiens: Musée de Picardie, 2006), no. 65, p. 100, relies heavily on and quotes Druick, “Puvis and the Printed Image,” 28–29, at length.

Striking in the Nelson-Atkins Return from the Hunt, even given its several iterations discussed here, are the changed pictorial elements in color, format, and scale. Puvis retained the basic, well-received image but presented it in overall blue tonalities,¹²I have previously written about Puvis’s blue tonalities, notably in Fantasy (La Fantaisie) (1866; Ohara Museum, Kurashiki, Japan) and Sleep (Le Sommeil) (1867; Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lille). Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, plates 63, 64, 72, pp. 1:59–60, 62, and nos. 140 and 151, pp. 2:112–15, 125–28. what the French call camaïeux. While contrasting colors differentiate forms and make each more distinct, a single color is a unifying feature, particularly important in this far-smaller panel. The shades of pigment need only be subtly varied to properly illuminate, bring together, and yet clarify diverse elements.

Whether the present painting is the same work given to Puvis’s friend Henri Lehmann (1814–1882)—then a famous painter and member of the Beaux-Arts establishment—and subsequently returned to Puvis, accompanied by a letter of thanks and a reference to not one, but two camaïeux, needs further documentation.¹³On their association and exchanges, see Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, 1:56, 191n236; and 2:76n3. Puvis was, by 1864, to execute four other elliptical, monochromatic paintings—one pair (with a horizontal orientation) in rosy pinks with a turquoise-cerulean background (akin to the tones in the Nelson-Atkins painting), and another two wholly in rosé tones—all as wall paintings for the Amiens museum (now the Musée de Picardie).¹⁴Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, nos. 115–16, 123–24, pp. 2:68–69. These works may have been prompted by Puvis’s essaying of that format and limited colors in his Nelson-Atkins experiment.¹⁵It is difficult to say with any certainty, however, that the signature—in block letters, unlike those in other works of the first two decades of Puvis’s production (though some of Puvis’s murals have uppercase letters that are more rectilinear)—are by him. Moreover, the letters seem to have been painted over several times and introduced with some insistence. That Puvis was systematic in his methods and deliberate in his choices tends, therefore, to argue for a possible later date within the range proposed for the Nelson-Atkins painting, for it might well have served as a prelude to the four Amiens works, a tantalizing yet logical supposition. Arguing against a date of 1860–61, however, is the fact that the artist was readying two mural-size canvases, Concordia and Bellum, for exhibition at the Salon of 1861,¹⁶Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, nos. 104, 105, pp. 1:38–44 and passim, plates 46–47. and he must have been preoccupied with that task. It well may be, then, that it was around 1862 that he revisited his Return from the Hunt subject matter and created the painting under discussion here.

Return from the Hunt was acquired by the Nelson-Atkins in 1933, shortly before the museum’s heralded opening. That a work by the much-vaunted and arguably most internationally famous French artist of the later nineteenth century (revered in the United States for his extensive late murals at the Boston Public Library) was among its treasures was recognized in multiple newspaper stories.¹⁷“Nelson Gallery of Art Special Number,” Art Digest (December 1, 1933): 22; “$15,000,000 Nelson Art Gallery Opens: Gift of Kansas City Star Publisher,” Boston Evening Transcript, December 11, 1933, 11; “Art Critics View Nelson Gallery,” New York Times, December 11, 1933, 24L; “Nelson Gallery of Art Opens,” Editor and Publisher, December 16, 1933, 10; A. J. Philpott, “Kansas City Now in Art Center Class: Nelson Gallery, Just Opened, Contains Remarkable Collection of Paintings, Both Foreign and American,” Boston Sunday Globe, January 14, 1934, 16; “A Thrill to Art Expert: M. Jamot is Generous in his Praise of Nelson Gallery,” Kansas City Times, October 15, 1934, 7.

Aimée Brown Price

January 2020

Notes

Various versions of this painting have been published with somewhat differing titles, even to including or eliminating the French article “le” or “la.” The Musée d’Orsay calls the Salon version of 1859, now in Marseilles, Retour de Chasse (Return from the Hunt), but their own catalogue, Puvis de Chavannes et le musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille (Marseille: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1984), no. 1, p. 52, titles the work Le Retour de la chasse and The Boar Hunt (La Chasse au Sanglier). Following previously published sources, Aimée Brown Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, vol. 2, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Painted Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), no. 95, pp. 68–69, lists the Nelson-Atkins painting as La Chasse au sanglier/ Return from the Hunt or The Boar Hunt.
For a more extensive discussion of the Le Brouchy murals and reproductions, see Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, nos. 48–61, pp. 1:36; 2:34–43. Since 1992, Le Brouchy has been classified as a Monument Historique; see https://association-dartagnan.fr/index.php/publications/15-traditions-bressanes/286-le-chateau-du-brouchy (with several errors, including that Puvis’s paintings there are “fresques” or frescoes) and https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_du_Brouchy.
The dimensions of the Le Brouchy mural are 98 x 87 1/2 in. (249 x 222.3 cm). For Puvis’s preliminary oil sketch of 1854, which is 21 7/8 x 18 7/8 in. (55.5 x 48 cm.), see Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, no. 51, pp. 1:36, 57, and 2:35.
In biblical Hebrew, “game” is not what Isaac sought, but “delicacies.” Game, the result of the hunt, is how the term has been translated into English—or “gibier” in French (undoubtedly Puvis’s source). Here this is represented by venison and boar, although in fact boar would have been forbidden food for the family of this Hebrew patriarch.
Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, no. 94, pp. 2:67–8, and for further discussion.
Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, 67 (see under “Sources and Literature”). See also Théophile Gautier, “Exposition de 1859,” Moniteur Universel (June 23, 1859): 721–22. Puvis’s entries to the Salon had been rejected since 1850.
Musée des Beaux Arts, Marseilles, BA103; for an image, see the photo agency of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux et du Grand Palais: https://www.photo.rmn.fr/archive/15-626150-2C6NU0AMVYQ7G.html.
The caption of this caricature reads: “Je regrette vivement que ce second numéro du Salon ne soit pas enluminé comme le premier cela m’aurait permis de donner un peu de couleur au RETOUR DE CHASSE, où M. Puvis de Chavannes n’en a pas mis du tout” (I deeply regret that this second issue of the Salon is not illuminated like the first, which would have allowed me to add a little color to THE RETURN FROM THE HUNT, where Mr. Puvis de Chavannes did not add any at all). My thanks for the superb documentation files at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for these references and to the staff there for bringing them to my attention.
Indeed, Ian Kennedy, the former Louis L. and Adelaide C. Ward Curator of European painting and sculpture, noting just those elements that had been satirized, inquired whether the Nelson-Atkins Return from the Hunt might not be a copy, because it was “too wooden and stiff.” Ian Kennedy to the author, November 10, 2004, NAMA curatorial files.
See the superb analysis by Douglas Druick in Puvis de Chavannes, 1824–1898, exh. cat. (Paris: Éditions des musées nationaux, 1976), no. 33, p. 53–55; also Douglas W. Druick, “Puvis and the Printed Image, 1862–1898,” Nouvelles de l’estampe (1977): 27–35. Druick wonders whether Félix Braquemond might have had a hand in producing the print.
Bruno Foucart, in his entry on the print in Puvis de Chavannes: Une voie singulière au siècle de l’Impressionnisme, exh. cat. (Amiens: Musée de Picardie, 2006), no. 65, p. 100, relies heavily on and quotes Druick, “Puvis and the Printed Image,” 28–29, at length.
I have previously written about Puvis’s blue tonalities, notably in Fantasy (La Fantaisie) (1866; Ohara Museum, Kurashiki, Japan) and Sleep (Le Sommeil) (1867; Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lille). Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, plates 63, 64, 72, pp. 1:59–60, 62, and nos. 140 and 151, pp. 2:112–15, 125–28.
On their association and exchanges, see Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, 1:56, 191n236; and 2:76n3.
Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, nos. 115–16, 123–24, pp. 2:68–69.
It is difficult to say with any certainty, however, that the signature—in block letters, unlike those in other works of the first two decades of Puvis’s production (though some of Puvis’s murals have uppercase letters that are more rectilinear)—are by him. Moreover, the letters seem to have been painted over several times and introduced with some insistence.
Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, nos. 104, 105, pp. 1:38–44 and passim, plates 46–47.
“Nelson Gallery of Art Special Number,” Art Digest (December 1, 1933): 22; “$15,000,000 Nelson Art Gallery Opens: Gift of Kansas City Star Publisher,” Boston Evening Transcript, December 11, 1933, 11; “Art Critics View Nelson Gallery,” New York Times, December 11, 1933, 24L; “Nelson Gallery of Art Opens,” Editor and Publisher, December 16, 1933, 10; A. J. Philpott, “Kansas City Now in Art Center Class: Nelson Gallery, Just Opened, Contains Remarkable Collection of Paintings, Both Foreign and American,” Boston Sunday Globe, January 14, 1934, 16; “A Thrill to Art Expert: M. Jamot is Generous in his Praise of Nelson Gallery,” Kansas City Times, October 15, 1934, 7.

Top of section

Technical Entry

Technical entry forthcoming.

Documentation

Citation

Chicago:

Danielle Hampton Cullen, “Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Return From the Hunt or The Boar Hunt, ca. 1859–62,” documentation in French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2025), https://doi.org/10.37764/78973.5.530.4033.

MLA:

Hampton Cullen, Danielle. “Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Return From the Hunt or The Boar Hunt, ca. 1859–62,” documentation. French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2025. doi: 10.37764/78973.5.530.4033.

Provenance

provenance

Citation

Chicago:

MLA:

Possibly given by the artist to Charles Ernest Rodolphe “Henri” Salem Lehmann (1814–1882), Paris, by June 13, 1866 [1];

Possibly returned by Lehmann to the artist, sometime after June 13, 1866 [2];

With F. and J. Tempelaere, Paris, stock no. 9601, probably around 1927–August 13, 1931 [3];

Purchased from Tempelaere by C. W. Kraushaar Art Galleries, Inc., New York, stock no. 26210, as Retour de la chasse au Sangulier [sic], August 13, 1931–May 5, 1933 [4];

Purchased from C. W. Kraushaar Art Galleries, Inc., by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1933.

Notes

[1] The painting may be one of two camaieux given to the artist’s friend and painter Henri Lehmann; both pictures were returned to Puvis by Lehmann around June 13, 1866. See letter from Lehmann to Puvis, June 13, 1866, private collection, France; cited in Aimée Brown Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 1:56, 191n236.

[2] The painting was probably restored by artist supplierartist supplier(s): Also called colormen and color merchants. Artist suppliers prepared materials for artists. This tradition dates back to the Medieval period, but the industrialization of the nineteenth century increased their commerce. It was during this time that ready-made paints in tubes, commercially prepared canvases, and standard-format supports were available to artists for sale through these suppliers. It is sometimes possible to identify the supplier from stamps or labels found on the reverse of the artwork (see canvas stamp). H. Vieille et Troisgros between 1873 and 1878. See black, oval stamp on the panel verso: VIEILLE / M^D. DE COULEURS / Rentoile et Restaure les Tableaux / Rue Laval 35, PARIS. Around this same time, from April 9 to 16, 1878, the painting appeared at the Salle des Dépêches du Figaro, the newspaper’s monthly exhibition, where it was for sale. See “Salle des Dépêches du Figaro,” Le Figaro (April 10, 1878): 3. It is not clear who owned the painting at this time.

[3] See stamp on the painting’s verso, upper left corner: TABLEAUX MODERNE/ F & J. TEMPELAERE/ 70 B^d Malesherbes/ PARIS. Tempelaere had their shop in the specified address from 1925 to 1939. See also a handwritten inscription on the far left of the verso: 9601. This is a Tempelaere stock number, as confirmed by Sylvie Brame, Galerie Brame et Lorenceau, Paris. Brame suggested the date of acquisition could be around 1927. See correspondence from Sylvie Brame, Galerie Brame et Lorenceau, to Danielle Hampton Cullen, the Nelson-Atkins, August 30, 2022, NAMA curatorial files.

[4] See two octagonal paper labels with red border on the panel’s verso: “26210/ [tsn?]” and “26210/ P. de Chavannes/ [tsn?].” See also Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Kraushaar Galleries Records, 1885–2006, Series 6.4, Financial Records, 1885–1957, Purchase Journal, 1928–1940, box 74, folder 7; and Sales Journal, 1930–1943, box 76, folder 3, page 136.

Top of section

Related Works

Citation

Chicago:

MLA:

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Esau Returning from the Hunt or Winter (oil sketch), 1854, oil on canvas, 21 7/8 x 18 7/8 in. (55.5 x 48 cm), private collection, Le Brouchy, illustrated in Aimée Brown Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), no. 51 , pp. 2:35–36.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Sketch for Esau’s Return from the Hunt, 1854, oil on canvas, 21 5/8 x 18 7/8 in. (55 x 48 cm), private collection, illustrated in Puvis de Chavannes et le musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, exh. cat. (Marseille: Le musée, 1984), 52.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Esau’s Return from the Hunt or Winter, 1854–1855, oil on canvas, 98 x 87 1/2 in. (249 x 222.3 cm), private collection, Le Brouchy, illustrated in Aimée Brown Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), no. 56, pp. 2:39–40.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Study for Esau’s Return from the Hunt, ca. 1859, red chalk, 11 1/4 x 9 1/4 in. (28.5 x 23.6 cm), sold at Collection Robert Lebel: Dessins Anciens et du XIX^e Siècle, (Paris: Sotheby’s, March 25, 2009), 96–97.

Attributed to Félix Nadar, after Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, caricature of Un Retour de Chasse, 1859, dimensions unknown, illustrated in “Nadar Jury au Salon de 1859,” Journal pour Rire: Journal Amusant, no. 185 (July 16, 1859): 5.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Return from the Hunt, 1859, oil on canvas, 155 1/2 x 116 1/8 in. (395 x 295 cm), Musée des Beaux-arts, Marseille, BA 214.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Abduction or Return of the Conquerors, ca. 1859–60, oil on wood panel, 18 1/8 x 15 1/2 in. (47.2 x 39.4 cm), private collection, France, illustrated in Aimée Brown Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), no. 96, pp. 2:69.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Return from the Hunt, 1862, etching in black on laid paper, second and last state, 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. (31.7 x 24.2 cm), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie, DC-303B-FOL.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Nude Man Sitting, 19th century, black crayon on translucent paper, 9 1/8 x 6 5/8 in. (23.2 x 16.7 cm), Musée du Petit Palais, Paris.

Top of section

Exhibitions

Citation

Chicago:

MLA:

Salle des Dépêches du Figaro, Hôtel du Figaro, Paris, April 9–16, 1878, no. cat.

Exhibition of Modern French Paintings, Water Colors and Drawings: Including an Important Group of Drawings and Water Colors by Constantin Guys, C. W. Kraushaar Art Galleries, New York, October 5–31, 1931, no. 10, as Return from the Hunt.

Puvis de Chavannes and the Modern Tradition, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, October 24–November 30, 1975, no. 1, as Return from the Hunt.

References

references

Citation

Chicago:

MLA:

“Salle des Dépêches du Figaro,” Le Figaro 24, no. 100 (April 10, 1878): 3, as Un Retour de Chasse au Sanglier.

Exhibition of Modern French Paintings, Water Colors and Drawings: Including an Important Group of Drawings and Water Colors by Constantin Guys, exh. cat. (New York: C. W. Kraushaar Art Galleries, 1931), unpaginated, as Return from the Hunt.

Katharine Grant Sterne, “On View in the New York Galleries,” Parnassus 3, no. 6 (October 1931): 6, as Return from the Hunt.

“Nelson Gallery of Art Special Number,” Art Digest 8, no. 5 (December 1, 1933): 22, as Return from the Hunt.

“The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City Special Number,” Art News 32, no. 10 (December 9, 1933): 28, as Return from the Hunt.

“$15,000,000 Nelson Art Gallery Opens: Gift of Kansas City Star Publisher,” Boston Evening Transcript 104, no. 288 (December 11, 1933): 11.

“Art Critics View Nelson Gallery,” New York Times 83, no. 27,718 (December 11, 1933): 24L.

“Nelson Gallery of Art Opens,” Editor and Publisher 66, no. 31 (December 16, 1933): 10.

The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Handbook of the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1933), 48, 138, (repro.), as Return from the Hunt.

A. J. Philpott, “Kansas City Now in Art Center Class: Nelson Gallery, Just Opened, Contains Remarkable Collection of Paintings, Both Foreign and American,” Boston Sunday Globe 125, no. 14 (January 14, 1934): 16.

“A Thrill to Art Expert: M. Jamot is Generous in his Praise of Nelson Gallery,” Kansas City Times 97, no. 247 (October 15, 1934): 7.

The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, The William Rockhill Nelson Collection, 2nd ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1941), 168, as Return from the Hunt.

Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 261, as Return from the Hunt.

Ross E. Taggart and George L. McKenna, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. 1, Art of the Occident, 5th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 258, as Return from the Hunt.

Richard J. Wattenmaker, Puvis de Chavannes and the Modern Tradition, exh. cat. (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1975), 42–43, (repro.), as Return from the Hunt.

Puvis de Chavannes: 1824–1898, exh. cat. (Paris: Éditions des musées nationaux, 1976), 55.

Marie-Christine Boucher, Palais des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Musée du Petit Palais: Catalogue des Dessins et Peintures de Puvis de Chavannes (Paris: Musée du Petit Palais, 1979), 14.

Puvis de Chavannes et le musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, exh. cat. (Marseille: Le musée, 1984), 52.

Puvis de Chavannes: Une voie singulière au siècle de l’Impressionnisme, exh. cat. (Amiens: Musée de Picardie, 2006), 99–100, as Retour de chasse.

Aimée Brown Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), no. 95, pp. 1:56, 191n236; 2:68–69, as Le Chasse au sanglier, Return from the Hunt, and The Boar Hunt.

Catherine Futter et al., Bloch Galleries: Highlights from the Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2016), 48–49, (repro.), Return from the Hunt.

Top of section