Puvis de Chavannes,
'The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist', about 1869.
London, The National Gallery.

Puvis de Chavannes: 'The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist'

The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham 19 April - 14 July 2002
National Gallery, London 24 July - 27 October 2002
Admission free

The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery, London and The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham.

This exhibition reunited two dramatic paintings of the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist by Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), one of the most important French artists of his time. Painted in the 1860s, these closely related paintings from the National Gallery and The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, The University of Birmingham, were brought together for the first time since 1904. The exhibition examined the working methods of the artist through drawings and recent x-rays. It also considered Puvis's personal preoccupation with the beheading of John the Baptist, a subject of great interest in France during the 19th century.

Both paintings show the moment of the execution. King Herod has promised to grant Salome, daughter of Herodias, anything she wishes in return for her dancing at a feast. Salome asks for the head of John the Baptist whom her mother has had thrown in prison. In addition to Puvis, many other writers, poets, composers and artists, including Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde, Richard Strauss and Gustav Moreau, were fascinated by the decadence and cruelty of the women of this story, whom they regarded as types of the femme fatale.

In the huge National Gallery painting, nearly four times the size of the Birmingham work, and perhaps unfinished, Puvis recalls his career as a mural painter. The painting presents a dramatic interpretation of the subject. Concentrating at the supreme moment of death on the visionary cross that rises from his hand, the Baptist appears absorbed in the spiritual world. In the Birmingham painting, first shown at the Paris Salon of 1870, he wears a halo of supernatural light, and stares directly at the viewer, protesting his helplessness and innocence. The paintings are boldly simplified and typically flat and pale in colour to create the effect of an Italian fresco. Puvis was a master of symbolism, allegory and decorative painting, admired during his lifetime and later by such artists as Seurat, Gauguin, Redon, Matisse and Picasso.


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