L'Hiver, esquisse pour l'Hôtel de Ville de Paris

This 1890 sketch for the Hôtel de Ville de Paris decorations captures Winter, one of the four seasons Puvis prepared as part of his grand allegorical scheme for Paris's municipal seat of government. The Hôtel de Ville commission was among the most prestigious civic decorations awarded in Third Republic France, and Puvis spent the early 1890s producing finished cartoons and preparatory sketches for the cycle. Winter posed particular compositional challenges — it demanded figures of cold, endurance, and civic solidarity rather than the pastoral ease that characterised Spring and Summer. Puvis resolved it through his characteristic device of slow, dignified figures moving through a simplified, near-abstract landscape. The sketch, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Paris, gives insight into his working method: he worked out compositional geometry and tonal relationships in these studies before transferring the design to the large-scale final paintings. The Hôtel de Ville decorations remain among the most visible public art of the French Republic.

As a preparatory esquisse, the paint application is looser and more spontaneous than Puvis's finished work, with rapid brushwork indicating tonal masses rather than describing surfaces in detail. The composition's structural logic — figure placement, horizon line, and spatial recession — is already fully resolved, confirming that Puvis planned comprehensively before executing.