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for WILLIAM ADOLPHE BOUGUEREAU
WILLIAM ADOLPHE BOUGUEREAU
1825 - 1905
(1825-1905).
French painter. Bouguereau was born in La Rochelle and studied in Bordeaux before attending the Académie Royale in Paris. In 1850 he won the Prix de Rome and on his return to Paris in 1854 found immediate success with The Body of S. Cecilia Borne to the Catacombs (Paris, Luxembourg). This launched an enormously successful and prolific career as an academic portrait painter, religious artist, and, above all, master of the female nude. The latter was saved from impropriety by classical antecedents and archaeological accuracy, as in the Dionysiac and orgiastic La Jeunesse de Bacchus (1884; priv. coll.) which also demonstrates his compositional expertise, much praised in his lifetime. A staunch academic and influential teacher, Bouguereau was vehemently anti-modernist and was ridiculed by Cézanne and Renoir among others. His formulaic paintings, in which transparent and knowing eroticism masquerades as High Art, were derided and neglected after his death but the recent revival of critical interest in 19th-century academic art has led to a largely favourable reappraisal of his work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Wissman, F., Bouguereau (1996).
David Rodgers
© Oxford University Press 2007
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