William Bouguereau Paintings 2 (1825-1905) A collection of paintings. 4K

William Bouguereau (1825-1905) French academic painter. In his realistic genre paintings he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body.

During his life he enjoyed significant popularity in France and the United States, was given numerous official honors, and received top prices for his work.

As the quintessential salon painter of his generation, he was reviled by the Impressionist avant-garde. By the early twentieth century, Bouguereau and his art fell out of favor with the public, due in part to changing tastes. In the 1980s, a revival of interest in figure painting led to a rediscovery of Bouguereau and his work.

Throughout the course of his life, Bouguereau executed 822 known finished paintings, although the whereabouts of many are still unknown.

n his own time, Bouguereau was considered to be one of the greatest painters in the world by the academic art community, and simultaneously he was reviled by the avant-garde. He also gained wide fame in Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and in the United States, and commanded high prices.

His works often sold within days of completion. Some were viewed by international collectors and bought before work had even finished.

Bouguereau’s works were eagerly bought by American millionaires who considered him the most important French artist of that time. But even during his lifetime there was critical dissent in assessing his work; the art historian Richard Muther wrote in 1894 that Bouguereau was a man "destitute of artistic feeling but possessing a cultured taste reveals... in his feeble mawkishness, the fatal decline of the old schools of convention." In 1926, American art historian Frank Jewett Mather criticized the commercial intent of Bouguereau’s work, writing that the artist "multiplied vague, pink effigies of nymphs, occasionally draped them, when they became saints and madonnas, painted on the great scale that dominates an exhibition, and has had his reward. I am convinced that the nude of Bouguereau was prearranged to meet the ideals of a New York stockbroker of the black walnut generation." Bouguereau confessed in 1891 that the direction of his mature work was largely a response to the marketplace: "What do you expect, you have to follow public taste, and the public only buys what it likes. That's why, with time, I changed my way of painting."

After 1920, Bouguereau fell into disrepute, due in part to changing tastes.

Comparing his work to that of his Realist and Impressionist contemporaries, Kenneth Clark faulted Bouguereau’s painting for "lubricity", and characterized such Salon art as superficial, employing the "convention of smoothed-out form and waxen surface."

In 1974, the New York Cultural Center staged a show of Bouguereau's work partly as a curiosity, although curator Robert Isaacson had his eye on the long-term rehabilitation of Bouguereau's legacy and reputation.

In 1984, the Borghi Gallery hosted a commercial show of 23 oil paintings and one drawing. In the same year a major exhibition was organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Canada. The exhibition opened at the Musée du Petit-Palais, in Paris, traveled to The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, and concluded in Montréal. More recently, resurgence in the artist's popularity has been promoted by American collector Fred Ross, who owns a number of paintings by Bouguereau and features him on his website at Art Renewal Center

Since 1975 prices for Bouguereau's works have climbed steadily, with major paintings selling at high prices: $1,500,000 in 1998 for The Heart's Awakening, $2,600,000 in 1999 for The Motherland and Charity at auction in May 2000 for $3,500,000. Bouguereau's works are in many public collections.

Notre Dame des Anges ("Our Lady of the Angels") was last shown publicly in the United States at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893. In 2002 it was donated to the Daughters of Mary Mother of Our Savior, an order of nuns affiliated with Clarence Kelly's Traditionalist Catholic Society of St. Pius V. In 2009 the nuns sold it to an art dealer for $450,000, who was able to sell it for more than $2 million. Kelly was subsequently found guilty by an Albany, New York jury of defaming the dealer in remarks made in a television interview.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William-Adolphe_Bouguereau

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