Focus on this artwork and explore the Exhibition.
The three different versions of The Sacred Grove have been displayed in various places. The large hemicycle in the Grand Amphitheater of the Sorbonne remains there as does the original painted for the museum in Lyons. The showcase piece however has travelled all over the globe and is one of the main representations of Puvis.
The first exhibition featuring The Sacred Grove was of course at the Salon in 1884 where it won the grand prize. Following the painting’s success there and the creation of the final work for the museum in Lyons, The Sacred Grove as the easel version was not displayed until many years later. It was exhibited after Puvis’ death, in 1975 at the Art Gallery of Ontario in an exhibition titled: “Puvis de Chavannes and the Modern Tradition” alongside its parody by Toulouse Lautrec: The Sacred Grove, Parody of a Painting by Puvis de Chavannes Exhibited at the Salon of 1884, and other paintings by artists whom he influenced, including Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Picasso. A similar exhibition was held in 1994 at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
In 2002, The Sacred Grove was housed at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, in an exhibition which focused on Puvis's influence on modernism and by extension abstract art. The Sacred Grove then returned to France in an exhibition at the Musée de Picardie in Amiens alongside some of Puvis’ other paintings which are permanently displayed there. 2005 saw the works of Lautrec and Puvis brought together again, when The Sacred Grove was exhibited in a show dedicated to Lautrec and their shared home: “Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre” at the Art Institute of Chicago, the painting's future home.Since Puvis had such a profound effect on Western-Japanese artists, The Sacred Grove was included in his first solo exhibition at Bunkamura the Museum, Japan in 2014 titled: “Arcadia by the Shore: The Mythic World of Puvis de Chavannes”. The latest display of The Sacred Grove and other works by Puvis was at the Michael Werner Gallery in Manhattan in early 2019 in the “Pierre Puvis de Chavannes: Works on Paper and Painting” exhibition. This was the first museum retrospective of Puvis’ work in the U.S.A.The Sacred Grove showcase piece is currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago in the European Painting and Sculpture Gallery.
Sorbonne Pierre Puvis de Chavannes Art Institute of Chicago Vincent Van Gogh Manhattan abstract art Chicago Venice Amsterdam Musée de Picardie modernism Amiens Michael Werner Gallery Paul Gauguin Gauguin Van Gogh Museum Japan Art Gallery of Ontario Picasso Palazzo Grassi