Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French Symbolist painter known for both his murals and works on canvas. The pale colors and Classical subject matter seen in his seminal work The Sacred Grove (1884), was largely influenced by studying the frescos of both Giotto and Piero della Francesca. “To simplify, that is to release the thought,” he once explained. “The simplest conception proves to be the most beautiful.” Born Pierre-Cécile Puvis on December 14, 1824 in Lyon, France, he studied under Thomas Couture and Eugène Delacroix in Paris, developing a style of simplified shapes and nuanced color. During the 1850s, Puvis befriended Edgar Degas, who shared his interest in melding antiquity with a modern sensibility towards painting. Over the following decades, the artist exhibited at the Salon and developed a number of patrons in both Europe and America. Influencing a generation of younger artists such as Paul Gauguin and Maurice Denis, Puvis’s work was widely acclaimed, appealing to both conservative and avant-garde painters alike. The artist died on October 24, 1898 in Paris, France. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the National Gallery in London, among others.