|
Adolphe William Bouguereau: training in Paris took place in the government sponsored art school, the Ecole
des Beaux Arts, where the students were taught how to draw. At that time the
craft of putting paint on canvas was taught elsewhere, that is, in the private
studios of the school's professors. Rigorous hurdles, in the form of
competitions of increasing difficulty, were placed before the students, the
highest hurdle being the Prix de Rome. Only ten students each year competed for
this coveted prize. The winner was sent to Rome, to stay for four years at the
Villa Medici, the seat of the French Academy in Rome, to study classical art and
the Italian Renaissance masters. This art training system, then, was oriented to
the past, for it was predicated on the notion that no artist since the
Renaissance had ever achieved the level of perfection reached by Raphael and
Michelangelo. It was the duty, obligation, and responsibility of contemporary
artists to embody in the present Just as the training was regulated, so were the
forms in which this tradition took shape. Paintings, for example, were ranked by
their subject matter. History paintings, stories of noble or tragic acts drawn
from history and myth, were accorded first rank. Then came portraits, worthy as
likenesses of important personages, then landscapes, and at the bottom, still lifes. The latter two, according to academic theory, were only copies of what
the artist could see, and could not carry a message of virtue or morality. Only
history painting, with its emphasis on the human body, could properly reflect
the training of the government schools and, with judicious choice of subject,
glorify the state. Thus, the highest prize, the Prix de Rome, was given to the
best history painting; the other genres, with the exception of a new category,
historical landscape painting inaugurated in 1817 did not even have a prize. The
main event in the arts calendar of Paris was the Salon, a
huge annual exhibition of contemporary art. As important as
the government was in commissioning works of art, there was
in fact a limit to the number of churches and governmental
buildings needing new decorations and the number of official
portraits required. In previous centuries the state, the
church, and the aristocracy (an extension of the state) were,
broadly speaking, the only institutions powerful and wealthy
enough to commission works of art, and therefore to
influence what forms art would take. In the nineteenth
century, as these institutions began to lose power, they
were overshadowed by the growing middle class, who wanted to
hang fine art in their homes. Before dealers became
established as buyers and sellers of art, which happened
around mid-century, the Salon functioned as the supreme
marketplace, where consumers could see, in one place, what
artists were capable of producing. Success at the Salon,
which was dependent on such factors as an advantageous
placement of works and favorable reviews in the press, could
guarantee for an artist a viable career.
Bouguereau's early artistic life began somewhat
inauspiciously. Although he was accepted at the Ecole des
Beaux Arts after only two months in Picot's studio, it was
as the ninety-ninth of one hundred pupils accepted. He was
chosen as a contestant for the Prix de Rome in 1848 (third
of ten contestants), in 1849 (seventh of ten), and again in
1850, when he was the last of the ten competitors chosen.
The Prix de Rome he was awarded in 1850, for his Zenobia
Found by Shepherds on the Banks of the Araxes, was in fact a
kind of second prize, as Paul Baudry (1828-1886) had won
more votes. Bouguereau was accorded a trip to Rome in part
because there was a vacancy at the Villa Medici; no prize
had been awarded in 1848 because of the revolutionary
turmoil in France that year.
Living in Italy, for Bouguereau, was a luxury; the prize was
four thousand francs, in addition to the six hundred he was
given by the Municipal Council of La Rochelle on his entry
into the art school in Paris. While there he applied himself
to such rigorous study that he earned the nickname of "Sisyphus."
In addition to absorbing the lessons to be learned in Rome
from antiquity and the work of Renaissance artists, he
traveled throughout Italy to copy the masterpieces found in Orvieto, Assisi, Siena, Florence, Pisa, Ravenna, Venice,
Parma, Naples, Pompeii, Capri, Bologna, Milan, and Verona.
He also visited the hill towns and lakes around Rome Terni,
Narni, Civita Castellana, Albano and Nemi, Castel
Gandolfosites that had inspired landscapists since the
seventeenth century. The things he saw during his sojourn in
Italy would inform his art for the rest of his life.
EARLY SUCCESS
Upon his return to Paris in early 1854 Bouguereau was
awarded valuable commissions in two areas, portraiture and
decorative cycles. These opportunities for work came from
both Paris and his hometown of La Rochelle. Bouguereau
continued to exhibit paintings (some of which had been
painted in Rome) at the Salon, where they were received by
the public with great favor. Because of his training at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and that institution's emphasis on
paintings with themes drawn from mythological, classical,
and biblical history, the subjects of Bouguereau's early
Salon submissions were mostly somber and serious. Titles
such as Combat of the Lapiths and Centaurs (1852; private
collection) and Le triomphe du martyre: Le corps de Sainte
Cecile apporte dans les catacombes (The Triumph of the
Martyr: The Body of Saint Cecilia Being Carried into the
Catacombs) (1854) indicate that the young artist aspired to
take his place in the tradition of grand history painting.
These pictures were not the kind, however, that had wide
commercial appeal. His art began to move away from grandiose
compositions to more genre-like scenes with fewer figures.
Mothers and children, shepherdesses, and children playing
were some of the themes that would find a place on the walls
of middle class homes. Bouguereau was a canny businessman.
In addition to exploiting the great marketplace of the Salon,
he allied himself with dealers who could show his work to
advantage and procure for him good prices. Toward the late
1850s his work was beginning to be handled by the dealer
Paul Durand Ruel (1828-1922); after October 1866, Adolphe
Goupil (1806-1893) was Bouguereau's exclusive dealer.
Beginning in the 1860s Bouguereau's paintings were
particularly popular in England and America, where the taste
for scenes of domestic sentimentality ran high.
...
Throughout the course of his career, Bouguereau was in the
habit of spending the summers in La Rochelle, painting in a
studio he had constructed there. After several years of
heart disease, he died in La Rochelle on August 19, 1905. It
is thought that his condition was exacerbated by the
burglary of his house and studio in Paris that spring, one
of a string of robberies in the neighborhood. He is buried
in the cemetery of Montparnasse, near the neighborhood where
he had lived.
- From "Bouguereau", by Fronia E. Wissman
|
