The young artist entered the Prix de Rome contest in April 1848.
Academic painting placed the highest status on historical and mythological subjects, and Bouguereau determined to win the Prix de Rome, which would gain him a three-year residence at the Villa Medici in Rome, Italy, where in addition to formal lessons he could study at first hand the Renaissance artists and their masterpieces, as well as Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities. Dante and Virgil in Hell (1850) was an early example of his neo-classical works. He was admitted to the studio of François-Édouard Picot, where he studied painting in the academic style. To supplement his formal training in drawing, he attended anatomical dissections and studied historical costumes and archeology. He arrived in Paris in March 1846, aged twenty.īouguereau became a student at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1845, he returned to Mortagne to spend more time with his uncle. All were unsigned and only one has been traced. To fund the move, he sold portraits – 33 oils in three months. He was soon the best pupil in his class, and decided to become an artist in Paris. Bouguereau also worked as a shop assistant, hand-colouring lithographs and making small paintings that were reproduced using chromolithography. There he met a local artist, Charles Marionneau, and commenced at the Municipal School of Drawing and Painting in November 1841. Bouguereau reluctantly left his studies to return to his family, now residing in Bordeaux. Here he was taught to draw and paint by Louis Sage, who had studied under Ingres. In 1839, he was sent to study for the priesthood at a Catholic college in Pons. At the age of twelve, Bouguereau went to Mortagne-sur-Gironde to stay with his uncle Eugène, a priest, and developed a love of nature, religion and literature. The family moved to Saint-Martin-de-Ré in 1832. He had an elder brother, Alfred, and a younger sister, Marie (known as Hanna), who died when she was seven.
The son of Théodore Bouguereau (born 1800) and Marie Bonnin (1804), known as Adeline, William was brought up a Catholic. William-Adolphe Bouguereau was born in La Rochelle, France, on 30 November 1825, into a family of wine and olive oil merchants. He finished 822 known paintings, but the whereabouts of many are still unknown. In the 1980s, a revival of interest in figure painting led to a rediscovery of Bouguereau and his work. By the early twentieth century, Bouguereau and his art fell out of favor with the public, due in part to changing tastes. As the quintessential salon painter of his generation, he was reviled by the Impressionist avant-garde.
During his life, he enjoyed significant popularity in France and the United States, was given numerous official honors, and received top prices for his work. In his realistic genre paintings, he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body. William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French academic painter.
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