Le patriotisme

Le patriotisme (Patriotism) of 1894, held at the Musée Saint-Nazaire, dates from a period of heightened civic emotion in France, when the Dreyfus Affair was beginning to polarise the Republic and patriotic sentiment was a subject of intense public contestation. Puvis, who had by the 1890s become a canonical figure in French culture, treated the subject with the idealism and formal calm that characterised all his allegorical work, representing patriotism as a dignified civic virtue rather than a militant or exclusionary force. The canvas belongs to his late career, when major public commissions — the Hôtel de Ville, the Boston Public Library, the Rouen City Hall — occupied most of his energy, and smaller allegorical canvases of this kind represent his parallel exploration of civic themes at intimate scale.

Late Puvis is characterised by an even greater economy of means than his middle-period work. Le patriotisme uses a severely reduced palette and broader, more summary figure treatment, with less internal modelling and more reliance on silhouette and compositional placement to convey meaning.