Les saisons, esquisse pour l'Hôtel de Ville de Paris

Les saisons, esquisse pour l'Hôtel de Ville de Paris is a preparatory study from 1890 for the complete cycle of four seasons that Puvis contributed to Paris's civic palace. The single-canvas sketch gathers all four seasonal allegories into one compositional overview, allowing Puvis to test the relationship between Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring as a unified decorative programme before working on each season separately. The Hôtel de Ville commission was his most prestigious Parisian public work, exceeding even his Panthéon decorations in civic visibility, and the preparatory process was correspondingly careful. This overview canvas, held by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Paris, offers an unusual insight into his thinking about sequence, tonal balance, and thematic coherence across a multi-panel scheme. The four seasons together form a complete meditation on time, nature, and the civic rhythms of a great city.

Compressing four seasonal compositions into a single canvas required Puvis to reduce each allegory to its essential figures and tonal character. The result is a rapid, schematic overview in which warm and cool passages alternate according to the seasonal programme — the coolest tones in the Winter section, warmest in Summer — demonstrating compositional thinking rather than finished surface.