On the 30th of November 1825, William Bouguereau was born. His father was a businessman who ran a small wine store and wanted William to enter the family business. Théodore's business really thrived and it caused the family to languish in endless quarrels compounded their difficulties with finances that placed them in dire straights. Mired in economic worry, couple sent the children off to stay with his uncle Eugène Bouguereau. Even at this early age, William spent his time illuminating his schoolbooks and notebooks with drawings.

His Uncle Eugène, whom William considered his surrogate father and mentor, introduced the youngster to Latin and French literature, giving him a classical education, and encouraging him to develop an interest in classical culture, an interest that the painter continued to pursue his whole life. Uncle Eugène also arranged for him to take drawing lessons and such was his ability that after only two years of study, he won first prize in the figure-painting class at the Bordeaux Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

He received his first drawing lessons from Louis Sage, a young professor who had been a pupil of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and was a committed classicist. Sage instilled the precepts of Ingres in his students, presenting the life of an artist as an endless competitive struggle. Bouguereau became convinced that persistent hard work was necessary in order to gain a superior mastery over the technical problems that could have shackled the free reign of his imagination.

William wanted to take drawing and painting at the Bordeaux municipal art school and after much prodding and on the advice of family friends, he was allowed to attend part-time for two years. His progress was in the school was so rapid that he won the 1844 prize for "Best Historical Painting" while competing against older students who were enrolled full-time. It wasn't long after this, with the financial help of his Uncle Eugène, that William moved to Paris to attend the Ecole des Arts.

After several tries in the entries of the Paris salon, William became one of the most talked about young artists in Paris and he continued to move upward. He became a highly sought-after academic portraitist and decorative painter. In 1881 he was elected president of the painting section of the Paris Salon and in 1883 he became president of the benevolent Society of Painters, Architects, Sculptors, Engravers, and Designers, which promoted and attended to the welfare of new and struggling artists. By 1888 he was appointed professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

He also taught drawing at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the independent Académie Julian. In his own drawings, many were rendered with the aid of an optical device known as the chambre claire. This instrument, by means of prisms, allowed the tracing of a subject's outlines, as observed by the artist, directly onto a drawing board. Used as an artist might use a photograph today, the chambre claire permitted the artist to readily and quickly reproduce certain details of nature which could be used later in the studio as details in a painting. Bouguereau would draw quickly, and keep the drawings by his side while working on the figures so he would have a well-balanced composition sketch. He also made drapery studies by posing a mannequin in place of the model and experimenting with the folds of cloth until a disposition was found that enhanced the underlying forms. Sometimes, especially for small or single-figure paintings, Bouguereau drew the model already draped. Most of his figure drawings were executed in pencil or charcoal and often heightened with white. The support for them was heavyweight toned paper of medium grain. This allowed him to dispense with the problem of rendering troublesome halftones which were more easily and accurately realized in the painted studies.

Throughout his career Bouguereau gained much official and public recognition, completing nearly 700 canvases during his long career but his reputation in France was quite low. Progressive painters and critics of the day including the Impressionists , considered him to be backward, artificial, and holding back the progression of French art. Edgar Degas verbally attacked him, terming his slick and artificially surfaced art "Bouguereaute' (Bouguereau-ized)". He was scorned as "a master in the hierarchy of mediocrity" and the most prominent representative of everything the new movement opposed: high technical finish, narrative content, sentimentality and a reliance on tradition.

Even so, Bouguereau was an admirer of traditional art and had no time for anything resembling innovation or the avant-garde. His sense of idealism was his guiding principle, regarding the ugly as worthless for representation and by the time of his death in 1905, he was one of the most respected and loved of all the French artists especially by the English and Americans. He was a favorite of collectors who found in his scenes of bathers, nymphs and other idylls, the perfect escapism from the pressures of everyday life.

To appreciate the art of Bouguereau one must have a deep respect for drawing and likewise, submit to the mystery of illusion as one of painting’s most sublime powers. Bouguereau’s vast repertory of playful and poetic images cannot help but appeal to those who are fascinated with nature’s appearances and with the celebration of human sentiment frankly and unabashedly expressed.

Bouguereau actively collected photographs and tempered his observations of nature with a keen awareness of the qualities of light inherent in the photographic image, he almost never worked from photographs.

He practiced a method of painting that had been developed and refined over the centuries in order to bring to vivid life-imagined scenes from history, literature, and fantasy. The process of acquisition of the skills necessary to produce a first-rate academic painting was a long and laborious one.

Bouguereau once wrote:
“Theory has no place.., in an artist’s basic education. It is the eye and the hand that should be exercised during the impressionable years of youth …. It is always possible to later acquire the accessory knowledge involved in the production of a work of art, but never - and I want to stress that point — never can the will, perseverance, and tenacity of a mature man make up for insufficient practice. And can there be such anguish compared to that felt by the artist who sees the realization of his dream compromised by weak execution?”

The singular goal of traditional art instruction was to endow artists with the skills essential for convincing pictorial actualization of their imagined visions. The croquis, figure drawings, compositional sketches, color studies, and cartoons were all logical steps in a process that at the end magically congealed separately studied details into an impressive, illusionistic, and unified ensemble. Plein-air studies were also commonly done as part of the training of most academic painters. The impressionist landscape painters, deeply stirred as they were by the visual world, limited themselves to this genre, and succeeded in refining certain techniques that wonderfully rendered out-of-door effects; these techniques were later adopted, in some measure, by many studio painters as well.

Although broken color was not an innovation of the Impressionists (Vermeer was well aware of the principle), some of them took the technique to its presumed theoretical limit. But they did so at the expense of form and modeling, which continued to concern academic painters as well as conservative Impressionists such as Degas and Fantin-Latour.

The painter Courbet, who professed disdain for the unseen worlds of the academicians, painted imagined scenes which he could not possibly have produced from direct observation; for their realization, he was perforce obliged to draw upon the traditional methods of the Academy.

The method Bouguereau used to execute his important paintings provided ample opportunity for the study and resolution of problems that might arise in each of these areas.
The separate steps leading to the genesis of a painting were:

1. croquis and tracings
2. oil sketch and/or grisaille study
3. highly finished drawings for all the figures, drapery, and foliage in the composition
4. detailed studies in oil for heads, hands, animals, etc.
5. cartoon
6. the finished painting.

Bouguereau was constantly making “thumbnail sketches”. These preliminary studies were done during meetings at the Institute or in the evenings after supper. For the most part they were scribbled from the artist’s memory or imagination, others were sketched directly from nature. These drawings constituted a very important element of Bouguereau’s work. They held a wealth of information about the artist’s method. They also show how a particular composition evolved. They were often refined by means of successive tracings.

Bouguereau was reputed to have the best models in Paris, some of them were not always the most cooperative; as one observer noted: “Bouguereau’s Italian model-women are instructed to bring their infant offspring, their tiny sisters and brothers, and the progeny of their highly prolific quarter. Once in the studio, the little human frogs are undressed and allowed to roll around on the floor, to play, to quarrel, and to wail in lamentation. They dirty up the room a great deal — they bring in a great deal of dirt that they do not make. They are neither savory nor aristocratic nor angelic. Sketchbook in hand, he records their movements as they tumble on the floor drawing the curves and turns of their aldermanic bodies, and he counts the creases of fat on their plump thighs.”

If a figure was to be clothed, Bouguereau would make drapery studies by posing a mannequin in place of the model and experimenting with the folds of cloth until a disposition was found that enhanced the underlying forms. Sometimes, especially for small or single-figure paintings, Bouguereau drew the model already draped. Most of the figure drawings were executed in pencil or charcoal (or a combination of the two) and were often heightened with white. The support for them is usually a heavyweight toned paper Of medium grain; such a background allowed Bouguereau to dispense with the problem of rendering troublesome half-tones which, in any event, were more easily and accurately realized in the painted studies.

Rêve de printemps 1901 Oil on canvas Private Collection	Vierge Consolatrice 1875 Oil on canvas Strasbourg, France	Tricoteuse 1879 Oil on canvas Private Collection

L'admiration 1897 Oil on canvas San Antonio Museum, TX	Biblis 1884 Oil on canvas Pivate collection