The Virgin with Angels by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

The Virgin with Angels by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Queen of the Angels

Painted in 1900, five years before the artist’s death, The Virgin with Angels is one of the last of Bouguereau’s great Marian canvases: nearly three metres tall. Its other name, Regina Angelorum — Queen of the Angels — is a title from the Litany of Loreto, and the picture is that title made visible. Mary stands before a jewelled throne, holding the Child in her arms beneath a crown of twelve stars, and the whole sky around her is filled with angels, ranked in a ring that closes behind her head like a second halo. Two kneel in the foreground swinging censers, so the viewer arrives, in effect, mid-liturgy.

The Bouguereau angel

Bouguereau painted angels for fifty years and settled on a particular kind: young, grave, unmistakably human faces, with no attempt at the otherworldly. Here there are dozens, and every one is an individual portrait. The effect is a crowd rather than a decoration — a court, attentive and quiet, with the Child looking out of it directly at the viewer.

Where it hangs

The painting belongs to the Petit Palais, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, which holds it as one of the anchors of its nineteenth-century collection. It is a companion in spirit to Song of the Angels of 1881, also in this catalogue, in which three angels play the sleeping Child to sleep: the same devotion, twenty years on, at a far grander scale.

About this print

The print is made from a full reproduction of the canvas. Its tall proportions suit the vertical formats it is offered in.

Sources: Petit Palais, Paris (Paris Musées collections) · Wikidata Q12837243 · Wikimedia Commons