William Bouguereau paintings

By the time of William Bouguereau's Death in 1905, he was once the most reviled and the most beloved of French artists. He was scorned by progressive painters and critics, who saw his painting all that was wrong with the official French world of art.

Edgar Degas and his friends used the term Bouguereaute to describe a general style, epitomized by Bouguereau paintings, they considered to be marred by slick and artificial surfaces, Yet Bouguereau was a favorite of collectors, who found in his paintings of bathers, nymphs, and shepherdesses a realm of eternal beauty, at a distance from contemporary life. Bouguereau's career began early and moved ever upward, with no professional setbacks to speak of. If his personal life was not so lucky, it was at the same time filled with not uncommon events. And, if we know less about his daily life than we do about Claude Monet's or Camille Pissarro, whose many letters to family, friends, and colleagues were saved and later published, it seems that Bouguereau would have wanted it that way. His personal life was his own; that which he wanted to share with the world, his art, he did in abundance.

Bouguereau was a man of tradition. Some of his contemporaries, such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Degas, also studied and honored the history of art, but they wanted to recast it in terms, and in a spirit, they felt were more suitable to the nineteenth century. By contrast, Bouguereau was a staunch supporter of the very forms of art that dated back to antiquity. He valued above all else the beauty of the human body. The Greek sculptors Proxiteles and Phidias, the touchstones of this tradition, placed their primary emphasis on the male body, as befitted their culture. Their legacy was revived by the great artists of the Italian Renaissance-Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, and their followers, These artists drew on a broader range of subject matter-both pagan and Christian themes-and were able to expand the aesthetic cannon to include the female body, both draped and nude. Bouguereau was beneficiary of this grand, humanistic tradition.

Central to this tradition is the discipline of drawing, especially as it was taught in the nineteenth century in the government-sponsored art schools across Europe. Though careful draftsmanship the successful artist would be able to replicate objects in real world-human figures, animals, trees and rock, architecture, and costumes-in order to insert them in his paintings, But these elements from the real world were to be idealized, stripped of their imperfections and made more beautiful than they were in actuality, for the paintings in which they appeared were not scenes from everyday life. but scenes that evoked a better, purer time and place. Bouguereau and artists like him used models, living people in the present, to create visions of a world apart. To characterized their works as "escapist" misses the point, for the spotless and adorable children, the nymphs and shepherdesses, and even the Madonnas in this idealizing tradition were drawn from actual life.

-19th Century Important
   Oil Paintings
  -Adrianus Eversen
  -Albert-Neuhuys
  -Arnaldo-Tamburini
  -Alfred Von Wierusz Kowalski
  -Arthur John Elsley
  -Bernardus Johannes Blommers
  -Charles Leickert
  -charles-louis-lucien-muller
  -CornelisGerritVerburgh
  -CornelisSpringer
  -Domingo-munoz-y-cuesta
  -Edmund-blair-leighton
  -FerdinandRoybet
  -FrederikMarinusKruseman
  -Frank BHoffman
  -Federico Andreotti
  -Fritz Wagner
  -Georges Antoine Rochegrosse
  -Georges Jules Victor Clairin
  -George Willem Opdenhoff
  -George Wright
  -Guillaume-Seignac
  -Harry Brooker
  -Henry Moore
  -Henry Scott
  -Heywood Hardy
  -Jan Frederik Pieter Portielje
  -Jan Weissenbruch Spohler
  -Jan Walraven
  -Josef Holstayn
  -Joseph Felon
  -Johan Laurentz Jensen
  -Julien Dupre
  -Leon Agustin Lhermite
  -Leon Francois Comerre
  -Louise Abbema
  -Ludwig Hans Fischer
  -Montague Dawson
  -Wilhelm Kuhnert
  -William Clarke Wontner



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