William Bouguereau is a brilliant artist who painted 800 paintings and who was forgotten for a century

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Adolphe-William Bouguereau (Bouguereau) (1825-1905) - one of the most talented French artists of the 19th century, the largest representative of salon academism, who wrote more than 800 canvases. But it so happened that his name and brilliant artistic heritage were subjected to severe criticism and were consigned to oblivion for almost a century.

In the French port town of La Rochelle, not far from the legendary Fort Boyard, in 1825, a boy was born into the family of the wine merchant Theodore Bouguereau, whose name will be at the head of French painting almost until the very end of the 19th century.

The giftedness of the future artist was fully manifested even in elementary school: all his notebooks were literally painted with drawings and various sketches. But due to financial problems in the family, a very young William was given to the care of his 27-year-old uncle Yuzhen, who instilled in the young talent an interest in philosophy, literature, mythology and religion.

At the age of 14, a gifted teenager enters college. And five years later, the 19-year-old boy will have his first creative success: he will be awarded the Best Historical Painting award.

At this time, William begins to dream about Paris and directly about the Higher School of Fine Arts. But this required a lot of money, and he earned it by painting portraits of church members and labels for jams.

Soon the dream came true, and William Bouguereau became one of the best students of this school. In an effort to learn more about his future profession, he takes courses in the history of costume, studies archeology and takes part in anatomical dissections.

All this formed him as an academic painter. In 1850, the aspiring artist wins the Rome Prize and receives a grant for an annual study in Italy, where he learns the basics of classical art, gets acquainted with the brilliant creations of the great masters of the Renaissance and gains his own recognition.

And when the painter returned to Paris, his popularity knew no bounds. Bouguereau worked tirelessly on his creations. From early in the morning he came to his workshop, and left after midnight. Like all great artists, he was characterized by constant dissatisfaction with himself and an irrepressible striving for perfection. For this, contemporaries gave him the nickname "Sisyphus of the 19th century."

And the talented painter was compared to Rembrandt. They said that the impeccable knowledge of the anatomy of the human body, meticulous detailing, surprisingly selected colors - all this made the paintings of William Bouguereau unusually realistic.

And already at the height of his fame, William marries Marie-Nelly Monchablo, who will give birth to five children. But the painter's family happiness will be short-lived. A terrible tragedy will burst into his life: one by one three of his children will die, and after them his wife will die. Heavy grief will fall on the shoulders of the artist and will be reflected in his work. One by one, he will write canvases - "The Virgin of Consolation" and "Pieta", embodying sorrow, suffering and irrepressible pain.

And in order to somehow forget about the bereavement, the artist devoted himself entirely to his work. He painted portraits and paintings on historical, mythological, biblical and allegorical subjects, where nakedness of female bodies and idleness prevailed, which caused discontent among many.

The painter was accused of debauchery and excessive eroticism of paintings that corrupted the younger generation. With each canvas, criticism flared up more and more. And in 1881, the French government subjected William Bouguereau to administrative control by representatives of the Paris Salon.

But Bouguereau continued to write in his own manner, and when new fashionable trends and directions began to pour into art, he did not accept them and with all his work opposed them.

Only 20 years later, William marries a second time. The chosen one will be his student Elizabeth Jane Gardner, who will devote herself entirely to her husband's affairs. The artist, it would seem, found the long-awaited peace of mind. But his happiness was again clouded by tragedy: the fourth son of his five children dies of tuberculosis.

The death of his son completely crippled the health of the master. A depressed mood, accumulated fatigue, an immeasurable addiction to alcohol and smoking had a detrimental effect on his heart. And at the age of 79, the brilliant painter was gone.

Oblivion and triumphant return

At the turn of the century, France, like the rest of Europe, radically changed its view of painting. And with the advent of modernism, the genius William Bouguereau, who became an outcast in the art world during his lifetime, was forgotten by everyone, including his students, among whom was the notorious Henri Matisse.

For almost a whole century, his name and artistic heritage fell into oblivion, and only in critical literature could one find a negative mention of William Bouguereau as a painter of the nude genre. His paintings, sent to the storerooms of museums, all these years were kept in damp basements and attics.

Beginning in the 1980s, the attitude of art connoisseurs to the salon-academic painting changed, and Bouguereau began to be seen as one of the most important painters of the nineteenth century.

In 1984, with the support of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Paris, the first retrospective exhibition of the brilliant painter was organized. With great difficulty, the organizers managed to collect and present the legacy of William Bouguereau. Many creations had to be restored, since almost a century passed, and the premises in which they were stored did not at all correspond to the special storage facilities.

The exposition of the works of the brilliant artist was an overwhelming success not only in France, but also in many countries of the world. Bouguereau's canvases returned to the history of art and took their rightful place among the masterpieces of painting.

At the first auction sales in 1977, the cost of William Bouguereau's paintings did not exceed $ 10 thousand, but already in 1999 only one painting "Cupid and Psyche" was sold at Christie’s auction for $ 1.76 million. Well, by 2005, the cost of his work exceeded $ 23 million. This was truly the triumphant return of the brilliant artist.

Unlike William Bouguereau, his student and friend Leon Basile Perrot at the Paris Salon received the title "hors concours", which gave him the right to exhibit his paintings without submitting them to the jury.