In the Heather

In the Heather of 1896, held at the Art Institute of Chicago, dates from Puvis's final productive years, when major commissions in Paris, Boston, and Rouen occupied most of his energy. The heather setting — a northern, moorland landscape quite different from the Mediterranean or classical settings of much of his work — reflects a late-career broadening of his landscape vocabulary. Heather moorland carries its own allegorical associations in nineteenth-century painting: desolation, wildness, the elemental persistence of nature — qualities Puvis could integrate into his characteristic mood of calm and endurance. The Chicago canvas presents figures in or near heather-covered ground in a landscape stripped to its most elemental constituents: sky, earth, and the low horizontal of heath. At nearly eighty, Puvis's visual language had become more spare and concentrated than ever.

The heather setting required a muted purple-grey palette — the distinctive colour of flowering heather — quite different from Puvis's usual golden or blue-grey tones. He handled it with his usual restraint, keeping the purple subdued rather than intense, and integrating figure tones with the ground to maintain compositional unity.