The nineteenth-century French painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes – idolised by Gauguin, admired by Picasso, less well known than he deserves to be – was strongly drawn to the story of John the Baptist’s death. Puvis painted two pictures inspired by the tale: a large unfinished painting done in the mid-1860s, owned by the National Gallery; and a smaller work, done a little later, now in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham. For the first time in nearly a century they can be seen side by side, in an exhibition arranged for the purposes of comparison. Today is the last day of its run in Birmingham (although it will also travel to the National Gallery, where it can be seen from 24 July). By way of encouragement to get along, this week’s picture is the Barber Institute Beheading of St John the Baptist.

 

The later of Puvis’s two pictures and therefore, so to speak, his final word on the subject, it was first exhibited in 1870. The reviews were not good. Jules-Antoigne Castagnary referred to it as “a grotesque vignette”, while the caricaturist ‘Cham’ satirised what he regarded as the picture’s unnatural compression in a cartoon with the mocking caption “Obliged to cut down the tree before coming to his head: John the Baptist still has a chance.”  The attack (while quite funny) missed the point of Puvis’s work. Naturalism and neat perspective were not high on his list of priorities. He harked back to early Italian Renaissance and Byzantine art (hence the icon-like face of St John, with its gold aureole). His aim, he said, was not principally to tell a story or flesh out a scene. “I have wanted to be more and more sober, and more and more simple. I have condensed,...

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