William Adolphe Bouguereau

Bouguereau was the most successful painter of his generation and then, for almost a century after his death, the painter critics taught their students to dismiss. Look at *The Birth of Venus* (1879) and the dismissal makes a kind of sense — the goddess is poreless, the sea is theatrical, the cherubs are sweet in a register modern eyes read as kitsch. Then look at *The Nut Gatherers* (1882) or *The Difficult Lesson* (1884), where two ordinary children sit close on a stone, and the finish does something different: it takes the children seriously. The same hand that smoothed Venus into marble gives a peasant girl's bare shoulder the exact temperature of an afternoon.

On the consumed-observation to commissioned-devotion axis the Artist Studies arc reads through, Bouguereau sits unusually — most of his work was *salable* rather than commissioned in the Sargent sense, painted on speculation for collectors who wanted finished beauty and got it. The devotion is to surface and to the academic ideal; the question is whether that devotion is hollow or whether the dismissal was about something else (modernism's need to clear the room, perhaps). Read him for what he taught — Henri Matisse studied with him — and for what he refused to give up when his contemporaries were already breaking the picture plane.