William Bouguereau

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) was a staunch traditionalist whose realistic genre paintings and mythological themes were modern interpretations of classical subjects with a heavy emphasis on the female human body.

In 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, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Romania 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 career was nearly a direct ascent with hardly a setback.

To many, he epitomized taste and refinement, and a respect for tradition. To others, he was a competent technician stuck in the past.

Degas and his associates used the term "Bouguereauté" in a derogatory manner to describe any artistic style reliant on "slick and artificial surfaces", also known as a licked finish.

In an 1872 letter, Degas wrote that he strove to emulate Bouguereau's ordered and productive working style, although with Degas' famous trenchant wit, and the aesthetic tendencies of the Impressionists, it is possible the statement was meant to be ironic.

Paul Gauguin loathed him, rating him a round zero in Racontars de Rapin and later describing in Avant et après (Intimate Journals) the single occasion when Bouguereau made him smile on coming across a couple of his paintings in an Arles' brothel, "where they belonged".

Bouguereau's works were eagerly bought by American millionaires who considered him the most important French artist of that time.

For example, Nymphs and Satyr was purchased first by John Wolfe, then sold by his heiress Catharine Lorillard Wolfe to hotelier Edward Stokes, who displayed it in New York City's Hoffman House Hotel.

Two paintings by Bouguereau in the Nob Hill mansion of Leland Stanford were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.

Gold Rush tycoon James Ben Ali Haggin and his family, who normally eschewed the nude, made an exception for Bouguereau's Nymphaeum.

However, 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 [who] 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".

Bouguereau fell into disrepute after 1920, 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".

The New York Cultural Center staged a show of Bouguereau's work in 1974-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.

In 2019, the Milwaukee Art Museum assembled more than 40 of Bouguereau's paintings for a major retrospective of his work, which according to the Wall Street Journal, asked the readers to "see Bouguereau through the eyes of an age when he was lionized, and Impressionism was dismissed as 'French freedom".

The exhibition later was scheduled to travel to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, Tenn., and then to the San Diego Museum of Art.

Prices for Bouguereau's works have climbed steadily since 1975, 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.

It was donated in 2002 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 for $450,000 to an art dealer, who was able to sell it for more than $2 million. Kelly was subsequently found guilty by a jury in Albany, New York, of defaming the dealer in remarks made in a television interview.