Regina Angelorum (1900)

William Bouguereau: Regina Angelorum

With this final offering, we come to the end of our journey through 19th-century French painting. I hope you have enjoyed it.

William Bouguereau (1900)

 William Bouguereau: A Childhood Idyll

  

William Bouguereau: The Little Marauder

William Bouguereau (1898)

William Bouguereau: Malice

 

 William Bouguereau: The Veil

Admiration (1897)

William Bouguereau: Admiration

The "child" is in fact Cupid (he's got wings and is holding an arrow), which makes this appropriate for Valentine's Day!

Compassion (1897)

William Bouguereau: Compassion

Sur la Greve (1896)

William Bouguereau: Sur la Greve

The Wave (1896)

William Bouguereau: The Wave

William Bouguereau (1895)

 William Bouguereau: Pleasant Burden

 

 William Bouguereau: In Penitence

  

William Bouguereau: Just a Taste

The Reader (1895)

William Bouguereau: La Liseuse [The Reader]

In La Liseuse Bouguereau features a young peasant girl sitting on a simple stone bench, one schoolbook open in her hands and a small pile of others by her side. Many artists in the nineteenth century created idealized images of the simple, honest life of the peasant as a form of reassurance in the rapidly industrializing modern world. Every summer Bouguereau would travel to the country and after months of relentless painting, bring back six to eight finished canvases. He found his young models, including the present one, in towns such as La Rochelle, a seaport in western France on the Bay of Biscay. La Rochelle had strong personal associations for the artist, as not only the place of his birth, but also the town where he chose to spend the last years of his life. The model featured here appears in a number of Bouguereau's work from 1893 onwards, along with the sisters Jeanne and Marguerite. In La Liseuse she is pictured with a playful look on her face as she glances up from her studies. Bouguereau depicts the same subject in Distraction, yet even though the model is his housekeeper's daughter, he shows her as a middle-class young lady. [Sotheby’s]

Spring Breeze (1895)

William Bouguereau: La Brise du Printemps [Spring Breeze]

Countess of Cambaceres (1895)

William Bouguereau: Countess of Cambaceres

William Bouguereau (1894)

William Bouguereau: Innocence

 

William Bouguereau: The Gleaner

After the Bath (1894)

William Bouguereau: Après le Bain [After the Bath]

Priestess of Bacchus (1894)

William Bouguereau: Priestess of Bacchus

Painted in 1894, Prêtresse de Bacchus is a tremendous example of Bouguereau’s virtuosic skill that had brought him such enormous commercial success by this point while anticipating his later compositions. In contrast to his earlier works that illustrate Classical themes, such as La jeunesse de Bacchus (1884) or Nymphes et Satyre (1873) – paintings that intended to convey a particular narrative – Prêtresse de Bacchus features a single model and belongs to a series the artist referred to as “fantasy paintings.” In the present work, Bouguereau isolates his subject within a vast landscape and, without any contextual framework beyond her costume, she becomes representative of a lost, ancient ideal.

The Priestess of Bacchus herself belongs to the iconographic tradition of Maenads, or Bacchantes; mythological women who were popular subjects with nineteenth century artists who favored them for their intrinsic eroticism and ecstatic youthfulness. Although her calm demeanor differs greatly from the usual ferocity of the lascivious Bacchantes, she is clearly identified as a Dionysian devotee by two unmistakable symbols: the ivy wreath she wears on her head, a reminder of her connection to wine and revelry; and the thyrsus she holds in her right hand, a pinecone topped staff originating in Attic vase painting as a symbol of Bacchus and present in several of Bouguereau’s other depictions of Bacchantes.

Bouguereau both acknowledges and modifies his Classical source, presenting this priestess simply as an enduring object of aesthetic contemplation.  The model for this work, an Italian girl who frequently posed for Bouguereau between 1894 and 1895, posed for several such “fantasies” including a companion painting to the present lot of a seated Bacchante (1894), as well as Souvenir  (1894), and Le secret (1894). In his choice of a model with recognizably Italian features, as well as in the work’s mise-en-scene against a cool-colored landscape, Bouguereau draws a comparison between these fantasies of an ideal antiquity and the contemporary Italian peasant women that form so much of his painted oeuvre, implying an unbroken continuum of idealized women from antiquity to his own time.

In depicting this young woman devoid of all other narrative context, Bouguereau guides the viewer’s focus to the figure’s delicate features and remarkable physiognomy; from her elongated neck, suggesting the influence of Bouguereau’s beloved Florentine Renaissance, and to her strong, contrapposto stance that evokes the autonomous beauty of Classical statuary.

This painting is especially noteworthy for its exemplary flesh-tones. Well-painted skin was considered both the greatest challenge and the most important painterly quality in much of nineteenth century Academic discourse. By depicting the priestess with her arm raised, he demonstrates the subtle play of color running down her arm, with hues of blue and purple paint overlaid by translucent layers of warmer tones. Indeed, the same principle of translucency that gives warmth to her skin informs the diaphanous handling of her drapery, which hints at the body beneath. [Sotheby’s]

Le Guêpier (1892)

William Bouguereau: Le Guêpier [The Wasp's Nest]

William Bouguereau (1891)

It is clear that in these two paintings Bouguereau not only used the same model, but she is also wearing the same outfit!

 William Bouguereau: The Earrings

William Bouguereau: Work Interrupted

William Bouguereau (1890)

 William Bouguereau: Calinerie [A Little Coaxing]

  

William Bouguereau: L'Amour et Psyché, enfants

The Bohemian Girl (1890)

William Bouguereau: The Bohemian Girl

The Bohemian is a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau completed in 1890. It depicts a barefooted young woman sitting on a concrete bench on the south bank of the Seine across from Notre Dame de Paris resting a violin in her lap. Her right arm is resting on her thigh while the palm of her left hand is pressed down on her left knee so that she does not lean on the violin. Her hands are clasped with the fingers pointing forward while her shoulders are wrapped in a shawl dyed maroon and light green, and she is wearing a gray dress that extends to her ankles. The bow of the violin has been stuck through diagonally under the fingerboard. To her right is a maple tree. [Wikipedia]

L'amour et Psyche (1889)

William Bouguereau: L'amour et Psyche

William Bouguereau arrived in Paris from the provinces in 1846 at the age of 20; he was determined to build a career as an artist. He immediately joined the atelier of the esteemed painter François-Édouard Picot, and soon after persuaded Picot to recommend him for entry to the École des Beaux-Arts. While he was barely accepted, placing ninety-ninth out of 100 applicants, Bouguereau went on to achieve extraordinary fame and popularity, becoming one of the most critically and commercially successful painters of his day.

By 1899, the year L'Amour et Psychè was painted, Bouguereau had attained a level of success likely unimaginable for a once quiet boy from a modest family in La Rochelle. He had received countless medals at various juried exhibitions both in France and abroad; secured numerous important public and private commissions; was named professor at the École des Beaux-Arts; and was made Officer of the Légion d'honneur, one of the most prestigious decorations in France.  Painted in the last decade of the 19th century,  L'Amour et Psyché embodies the culmination of Bouguereau's long and successful career.  It displays his consummate artistic ability, particularly in rendering the human form, where his two protagonists appear as if created by real flesh and bone rather than paint and brush.  From a commercial point of view,  L'Amour et Psyché represents Bouguereau's keen understanding of contemporary popular taste, an appreciation which had evolved throughout his career. In fact, this painting is almost the polar opposite of his monumental early masterpiece, Dante et Virgile aux Enfers from 1850, the type of painting he himself acknowledged would never appeal to the main-stream art buying public.

Our painting is closely related to two other versions of the subject painted earlier in Bouguereau's career. In 1889, he created Psyché et l'Amour, his first life-size version of the mythological lovers as young adults hovering mid-air. That same year he created another version of this subject, L'Amour et Psyché, enfants, this time depicting the characters as young children resting on, rather than soaring through, the clouds, with Cupid pulling a reluctant Psyche toward him for a kiss. Five years later Bouguereau returned to the theme of the two lovers as young adults, creating Le ravissement de Psyché (1895), which also features a full-size Cupid and Psyche traveling to Cupid's celestial lair. Bouguereau's repeated return to this subject of young adult lovers featured in a large-scale, full-size format attests to its enduring popularity and the artist's personal satisfaction with his interpretation of it.

The tale of Cupid and Psyche greatly appealed to turn-of-the-century audiences for its obvious themes of love, beauty, jealousy and perseverance; with the ultimate conclusion that love conquers all. As the story goes, Psyche, a young mortal woman of exceptional beauty, drives the powerful goddess of Love, Venus, into a jealous rage. Venus in turn commands her son Cupid to use his famous golden arrow to make Psyche fall eternally in love with a monster. Cupid approaches Psyche in her sleep and, upon seeing her, is too overcome with her beauty, accidentally scratching himself with his arrow. Victim of his own trickery, he falls deeply in love with the human girl. After a complex series of trials and tests created by Venus to destroy Psyche, the young mortal woman prevails and she and Cupid are united in a marriage blessed by Jupiter. Psyche is ultimately transformed into a goddess.

In L'Amour et Psyché, the two figures are a physical embodiment of the transportive power of love, as Cupid is literally moving Psyche through the air, away from Earthly hardships, and toward a celestial world. Cupid's role as Psyche's protector is reinforced by his lean physical strength and broad, outstretched wings. Psyche, appearing demure in his firm embrace, is often identified by butterfly wings, as her name in Greek literally means "soul" or "butterfly," and she has come to represent the human spirit's ability to emerge from darkness. She is particularly striking in her distinctly feminine physique, which is accentuated by her position in Cupid's arms. The origins of this pose are found in a preparatory drawing (fig.4); it is also interesting to note that Bouguereau's decision to show the back of Psyche rather than the frontal pose of the 1889 and 1895 versions, recalls an earlier motif that he used in his 1884, L'Etoile perdue. Additionally, Bouguereau worked out the final composition by repeating the two figures in a variety of interchangeable poses on separate sheets of drawings. Once he had settled on the final composition, he made a small, almost "impressionistic" oil sketch to determine his color choices. The last step of the process was to complete a large cartoon on blue paper, close to the scale of the final painting.  All of these preparatory works are in a private French collection. [Sotheby’s]

The Little Sulk (1888)

William Bouguereau: Petite boudeuse [The little sulk]