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1825-1905 • French • Painter • Academic
As long as he was in the room, there was absolute silence. . . . It usually took three hours to criticize the entire class during which time the models shifted their positions only as the master moved from one student to another. . . Endless) from one easel to another the little mall shifted or glided and spoke words of criticism or praise. Always gentle, always fair, never saying things he did not really mean, it was a pleasure as well as a privilege to listen to him. (Edm and Wuerpel )
Bouguereau upheld the CLASSICAL tradition in the face of one avant-garde movement after another. His subjects were primarily women and children in a number of roles. When he painted peasant women, they were beautiful, hare-foot, and nubile; his Destitute Family (1865) has the pyramidal composition of a RENAISSANC E picture. The underlying eroticism of his females becomes overpowering, literally, in his riotous picture Nymphs and Satyr (1873): Four voluptuous nudes dance around and tug at an inexplicably recalcitrant satyr in a lush green glade. The historian William Gerdts wrote about how this painting, transported from Paris, where it was a SALON picture, to America, where it became a saloon painting, was installed "next to a stag's head, no less," over the bar of a popular New York watering hole. APRIXDEROME winner, Bouguereau lived in Rome 1850-1854, then returned to Paris with great success. From 1883 he was a teacher at the ACADEMIE JULIAN - Edmund Wuerpel was an American student who recorded Bouguereau's studio practices, as quoted above. Bouguereau married one of his first students, Elizabeth Jane Gardner (1837-1922), also an American, and one of the first American women to pursue formal art classes in Paris. (Women were not allowed to study at the ECOLEDES BEAUX-ARTS, but were admitted at the Academie Julian and at independent studios run by artists like BON NAT.) Gardner always worked in the style of her teacher, but two of Bouguereau's other American students, BEAUX and HENRI, went in very different directions, not only from their teacher, but also from each other.