10/3/2017 The Last History Painter: William Adolphe Bouguereau - The Imaginative Conservative

The Last History Painter: William Adolphe Bouguereau

Culture Art History by
James F. Cooper

The Wave (1896)

William Adolphe Bouguereau (18251905) was one of the most successful artists of the nineteenth century, a
President of the French Institute, and recipient of the nations highest honors including the Legion of Honor. But he
came to represent everything the modernists imagined they were fighting against. In recent years, his work has
been re-evaluated. The rehabilitation continues with the publication this year of a lavish two-volume, 900-page
catalogue raisonn, William Bouguereau: His Life and Works, by Damien Bartoli and Fred Ross, with hundreds of
beautiful reproductions. The book offers the most carefully documented account to date of the artists career.
Bouguereau is often associated with the genre of history painting, which was ranked by the nineteenth-century
academies of Europeas the highest expression of Western art. In 1848, the French Academy established the
Grand Prix de Rome, to be awarded only to the most deserving, accomplished artists, to study at the French
Academy in Rome. The timing was no coincidence. During the June Revolution of 1848, fought in the streets of
Paris and other large cities of France, some 10,000 liberals and socialists were killed, imprisoned or deported by
the National Guard. The upper classes were conservative, and the French Academy and the art salons reflected
their views. Rome was considered the best educational environment to strengthen the classical tradition.
Bouguereau came from a bourgeois, conservative, Catholic background. His father was a wine merchant, who
wanted his son to follow him in the trade, but his mother encouraged his artistic bent. The revolutions, riots, and
wars that followed over the next twenty years confirmed for many that France was severely threatened from within.
In July of 1848, young William wrote in his journal:

Can nothing restrain the masses? Alas no! Faith does not exist or is rare, and strength is waning.
What can anyone depend on? Oh, how dark is the horizon! Paris, France, can it be that your life is
finished? I am fearful. Corruption is widespread. The philosophers and socialists have warped the
minds of the masses. Decadence is imminent. Signs like this have always proceeded the fall of
empires.[1]
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10/3/2017 The Last History Painter: William Adolphe Bouguereau - The Imaginative Conservative

Like Eugne Delacroix, who had painted the iconic Liberty Leading the
People (1830) but by 1848 had lost faith in the wisdom of the masses,
Bouguereau avoided politics for the rest of his life. Instead, he sought
inspiration from the spiritual, harmonic, moral order as the best way to
benefit the arts and, consequently, civilization. It would take some time
before he developed the skills and iconography to express his
philosophy.
No one worked harder or more obsessively at his art. His schedule was
to paint from dawn to dusk, six days a week. He was mentally prepared
for the grueling Prix de Rome competition, which took several months,
consisting of various tests, which included a large finished painting on a
historical theme selected by the judges. The first time he applied,
Bouguereau submitted The Death of Demosthenes (1848). It placed
third. The following year he submitted Saint Peter, after his Delivery
from Prison by the Angel (1849). In 1850, he submitted Zenobia Found
by the Shepherds of the Arax, for which he was awarded a special
runner-up Prix de Rome. It was not first prize (that year no one was
awarded first prize), but he was soon ensconced with the other students
Self-Portrait (1886)
at the majestic Villa Medici in Rome. Fellow students included
Alexandre Cabanel, Gustave Boulanger and Alfred de Curzon.
From the journal he maintained most of his life, we learn he read
prodigiously: Homer, Aeschylus, Virgil, Sophocles, Seneca, Ovid, and
many religious works, including Lives of the Saints and The Philosophy of
Christianity. He investigated all parts of Rome, the museums, churches
and classical ruins and antiquities, studying the works of Raphael, Bernini,
and Michelangelo. A visit to the Villa Borghese left him open-mouthed
with admiration.[2] The architectural and sculptural splendors of the
Eternal City overwhelmed his senses. Bouguereau was so steeped in
ancient classical history, architecture and mythology that it never occurred
to him that he would become anything but a history painter. His
neoclassical paintings Dante and Virgil in Hell (1850) and
[Roman] Idyll (1852) were already admired by his peers. Self-
Portrait (1853) reveals an elegant young man with piercing intelligent
eyes.
With fellow students, he traveled throughout Italy, making plein
air landscape studies and architectural sketches. He returned to Paris in
1855 and immediately attracted public attention with a monumental (14
feet-by-12 feet) history painting, The Martyrs Triumph (1855), bearing the
Dante and Virgil in Hell (1850)
influence of Jacques Louis Davids neoclassical style. The Academy of
Arts unanimously praised the work. The French poet and art critic, Thophile Gautier, predicted a great future for
him. That same year, the young man won even greater acclaim at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, which was
covered by the national press. These exhibitions drew immense crowds, over a million visitors annually.
Bouguereau was suddenly famous, and the commissions flooded in.
Some of Bouguereaus early portraits and history paintings lack a quality of perfection he would later achieve when
he became more passionately engaged in the subject he was depicting. However, he continued to be enormously
successful during the next decade. Then came the momentous year of 1863, when everything changed. Napoleon
III granted a state-funded Salon des Refuss for the 2,800 artists rejected by the official Salon of 1863, many of
them Impressionists. Bouguereau experienced some sort of an epiphany. He had submitted a very
handsome Sainte Famille [Holy Family] to the official Salon, but decided thereafter not to concentrate on history
themes anymore, no matter how much they pleased the government or the Academy judges. Works by Jean-Louis
Ernest Meissonnier (181591) and Cabanels The Birth of Venus (1863) garnered the highest honors. In 1863, too,
were created the two works most credited with launching the modernist era. The first and most revolutionary was
Edouard Manets le Djeuner sur lherbe. It caused a scandal, with a nude woman reclining on the grass in the
center of a group of fully dressed young male students. The painting, based loosely on Giorgiones The
Pastoral Concert (1509), refused entry to the official salon, was exhibited the same year at the Salon de Refuss.
[3] The painting shocked not only because it seemed to mock a classical theme, but also because the paint
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been applied with phlegmatic brushstrokes and the skewed spatial and aerial perspective eliminated distance, so
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that the composition appeared flat. The other painting, less well known,
was The Bellelli Family, by the semi-recluse Edgar Degas. Both artists had
been inspired by seventeenth-century paintings by Velzquez during a trip
to Seville, Spain. While sharing many of Manets stylistic objectives,
including brushwork and flatness, Degass group portrait introduced the
theme of modern alienation and existentialism. In 1863, Napoleon III
purchased Cabanels The Birth of Venus, which he declared the greatest
painting of the age. Bouguereaus Sainte Famille [Holy Family] was
purchased by the Emperors wife.
History was increasingly
perceived as a fabrication
of the rich and powerful
by a radical intellectual
elite. Napoleon III
elected presidenthad
quickly grabbed power
and appointed himself
emperor, like his famous
Sainte Famille (1863)
uncle. Degass The
Bellelli Family had a profound effect on other artists with its
sense of brooding alienation. Manets painting shocked the
bourgeoisie with its open attack on propriety, thereby setting an
avant-garde standard for the next hundred years. But the
modernists were on to something. France was experiencing one
crisis after another, laying bare the nations growing internal The Bellelli Family by Edgar Degas
weakness. Napoleon III attempted to strengthen the empire through conquest and increased industrial production.
Both efforts failed to keep up with Prussias rapid industrialization. In an attempt to acquire Mexico while the United
States was distracted with its Civil War, Napoleon III installed a Hapsburg on the Mexican throne. Before the
Americans could invoke the Monroe Doctrine, the French army was booted out of Mexico by an army of peasants,
led by the messianic Benito Juarez. Sensing Frances growing weakness, Prussia successfully invaded in 1870
and occupied Paris. At the same time, Prussian Chancellor Bismark announced the unification of the loose
confederation of 1,100 German states and duchies into one powerful nation. Under the terms of surrender, the
territory of Alsace-Lorraine was ceded to the new Germany. Napoleon III abdicated, and his demoralized
successors formed a Third Republic. The collapse of the French government resurrected Bouguereaus worst
fears.
The new French government pressured the Ministry of Culture to organize a Grand Triennale of history painting, to
raise the morale of the French people and the arts community, who were incorporating themes of decline and
decadence. The Ministry selected Meissonnier to organize the exhibition. Many artists saw through the charade.
Among those who refused an invitation to exhibit was Bouguereau. The Ministry simply borrowed some of his
works. The exhibition was a grand failure. Increasingly, the public turned to the works of the Impressionists with
their theme of art for arts sake. The art world, like French politics, was splitting into two camps. Almost alone,
Bouguereau continued to focus on spiritual and religious subjects. Not even the notorious Dreyfus Affair provoked
a single notation in his voluminous journals. It is those passionate masterpieces, beautifully reproduced in Rosss
book, that attracted a large cult following during his lifetime, in France and America. Germany itself was
experiencing a spiritual renaissance in the works of the Nazarene artists, who had established a religious school of
art in a large medieval monastery just outside Rome. There were religious stirrings among the Pre-Raphaelite
artists in England, inspired by the writings and messianic lectures of Ruskin. (Ruskin also had a profound influence
on the artists of the American Hudson River School.) Bouguereau had the advantage of the best secular
anatomical education in the nude figure, which was then provided by the French Academy. Few artists of any
nation could match the perfection and grace of Bouguereaus figure paintings and drawings.
From the age of sixty and over the next twenty years, Bouguereau produced a series of masterpieces that set him
apart both from the modernists and from those who continued to exploit the feeble tradition of history painting.
Bouguereaus Birth of Venus (1879) is a welcome antidote to the coy semi-pornography of Cabanels 1863 version.
A few years earlier, a saddened Bouguereau had painted a powerful Piet (1876), eulogizing the death of his son.
The crucified Christ is cradled in the lap of a grieving Mary, surrounded by angels. The Madonnas black robe
silhouettes the limp body, creating a beautifully intricate balance of dark and light, leading the viewers eyes from
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the center of the composition, full circle clockwise, along an intricate visual path from angel to angel to the grieving
angel on the far right of the canvas, whose hand is gently touching the limp arm of Christ. The visual aesthetics of
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the composition are completely synchronized with the subject. This perfect
balance between narrative and abstraction is achieved when Bouguereau is
deeply inspired, as in such masterpieces such as the Virgin of the
Angels (1881) and The Virgin, the Child Jesus, and St. John the Baptist (1881).
Bouguereau created a series of angelic young women, surrounded by putti and
hovering cupids, named after the seasons. An outstanding masterpiece is Alma
Parens (1883), conceived as a metaphor for France, stoically nurturing her
children. Each masterpiece has its central focus in the classical perfection of an
ethereal Madonna-like goddess, drawing the other figures in the painting to her
for comfort and succor. While the aesthetics of the composition, the anatomical
perfection, the harmony and grace are idealized, the details are drawn from the
real world by observation and study. Several chapters in Rosss book are
devoted to the painters craft: drawing, palette, and pigments; preparation of the
canvas, preparatory sketches, and thumbnails; his work schedule and
numerous observations of the master at work made by pupils and frequent
visitors to his atelier at the famous Academy Julian. The book is an invaluable
guide for the serious classical artist.
Miraculously, by the end of his career, as he
Birth of Venus (1879)
approached eighty, he had produced a
series of Madonna and Child paintings that are among his best work. The Virgin
of the Lillies (1899), which is part of the Newington-Cropsey Collection, evokes
the flat, rich decorative motifs and patterns one observes in early Renaissance
religious paintings. Crippled by age and illness, he continued to paint and
attend to his teaching. In the last year, he managed to produce a dozen
paintings. Despite a declared national period of mourning, within a few years
after his death, the backlash had begun. Within a few more years, his name
and work had been largely expunged from public memory. Textbooks were
rewritten to eliminate Bouguereaus contributions to the history of art. Now, after
almost a century of rejection, his paintings are once again drawing attention
and admiration. Today, in America, Bouguereau is a respected figure for
hundreds of students working in small, independent atelier, like those of Jacob
Collins and Stephen Gjertson. When I was a young art student, teachers would
literally twist the Cont stick out of your hand if they observed you trying to
create a classical approach to the figure. For much of the last half of the
twentieth century, classicism and realism were out of favor. Finished, formal
works were anathema. The Virgin of the Lillies (1899)

Ironically, Bouguereau embraced the same aesthetic qualities all great artiststraditional or avant-gardeadmire.
In his journal he wrote:

One is born an artist. The artist is a man with a special nature, possessing a peculiar sense; that of
seeing form and color spontaneously, as an ensemble in perfect harmony. If one lacks this sense, one
is not an artist, and one can never become an artist, one will lose ones time in hoping. The craft may
be learned by study, by observation, by practice; it may be perfected by incessant labor. But the artistic
instinct is inborn.[4]

Bouguereau died in 1905 at the age of eighty, having created over 700 paintings, some as large as murals, and
several thousand drawings. His sales in America outnumbered his sales in France. He never wavered in his
conviction that he was fighting a spiritual war with modernity, but he was also fighting a war against the breakdown
of educational rigor. There is a general tendency to group all of his paintings togetheractually, there was a great
break in the quality and thematic direction of his work. This shift in direction needs to be considered to evaluate this
great artists lifetime achievement.
A small group of dedicated curators, collectors, and artists have steadfastly advanced this cause during the
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last
thirty years. Outstanding are the contributions of Gregory Hedberg, director of European Art at the Hirschl & Adler