Hope

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes completed this Symbolist allegory in 1872, responding to France's devastating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. A young woman sits on a burial mound covered with white drapery, holding an oak branch. Behind her, a desolate landscape shows ruined buildings and makeshift grave crosses.

Yet flowers grow through stones, and light glimmers on the horizon. The painting spoke to a traumatized nation, offering hope without false optimism. Puvis exhibited it at the 1872 Salon. The simplified forms and muted palette influenced younger artists; Gauguin kept a reproduction in Tahiti and featured it in his painting Still Life with Hope. A smaller, nude version exists at the Musée d'Orsay. This clothed version measures 102.5 x 129.5 cm and hangs at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.