William-Adolphe Bouguereau

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) was born in La Rochelle into a family of wine and olive oil merchants and was brought up a Catholic. After art school in Bordeaux he went to Paris in 1846, entered the École des Beaux-Arts and the studio of François-Édouard Picot, and in 1850 won the Prix de Rome, which took him to the Villa Medici from 1851 to 1854. He exhibited at the Paris Salon for his entire working life and became the archetypal salon painter of his generation, scorned by the Impressionists and out of favour by the early twentieth century until a revival in the 1980s. His classical and Christian subjects were built up from detailed pencil studies and oil sketches, and his painting of skin, hands and feet was especially admired. Napoleon III bought his Holy Family in 1863. For decades he taught at the Académie Julian, where Elizabeth Jane Gardner, later his second wife, was among his pupils. Five works here: Pietà, Song of the Angels, The Holy Women at the Tomb, The Virgin of Consolation and The Virgin with Angels.