The art world is a funny old fish when it comes to “what’s hot and what’s not” and it was ever thus; unless you’re a bolted-on, world-renowned big name like your Rembrandts and your Van Goghs, you might find yourself in or out of fashion. Take William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905). Many people outside (and probably inside) of France have never heard of him, and yet he was one of France’s preeminent academic painters in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Bouguereau executed some 822 known paintings during his career, often portraying quintessentially classical and mythological subjects: Cupid and Psyche, the Birth of Venus, nymphs and satyrs and so on, as well as a large body of slick religious works, pastorals, and coyly erotic nudes. His portraits were rendered with near-photographic verisimilitude and with a consummate level of skill and craft. Given that a high percentage of his works are life-size, it is one of the largest bodies of work ever produced by any artist. So what went wrong?
Well, Bouguereau represented the “old guard”, an upholder of traditional values and indeed one who contrived to exclude avant-garde work from the Salon ( the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris). Cézanne once expressed regret at being rejected by the ‘Salon de Monsieur Bouguereau’. In other words, he was a dinosaur and destined to be overshadowed by the Impressionists and the modernists of the dawning new century; his reputation sank after his death and for many years his work was regarded as irredeemably passé. He has, however, recently achieved something of a rehabilitation, and these days his works fetch huge prices at the auction room. Quite right too, he was brilliant.
A representative work is this 1894 piece, Bacchante. A bacchante was a priestess or follower of Bacchus, the god of wine and intoxification, and, whilst in the Greek myths they are often depicted as wild women, running through the forest, tearing animals to pieces, and engaging in other acts of frenzied debauchery, Bouguereau here chooses to portray his Bacchante ‘before the party’!
