The Techniques of William adolphe bouguereau
Some of the paintings in the world's museums and galleries have survived in their original form, while others have been redone but maintained the original theme. His artistic skills and techniques are obvious in all these paintings.
Bouguereau had the honor of receiving commissions to decorate public buildings, private houses and churches by doing his work in academic style and excelling in salons.
Sometimes he would rely on his own style to paint and at times employ the styles from other groups. In addition, he also preserved his public painting to sell to the patrons such as The Annunciation (1888). Bouguereau also painted many portraits, even though they were for wealthy patrons. Those portraits have remained in private hands.
Bouguereau blended traditional and new painting styles to come up with his painting. This included oil sketches, detailed pencil studies and organizing his work carefully.
As a result, he depicted various human forms accurately and in pleasing ways. In particular, his hands, skins and feet painting were admired. In addition, he employed erotic and religious symbolism, such as the old master "broken pitcher" that indicated lost innocence.
The Legacy of William adolphe bouguereau
The 20th century popularity of Impressionism - and the attitudes of the Impressionists to Bouguereau's work - partly explains Bouguereau's posthumous demise. The advent of avant-garde movements in the second half of the 19th century created a new paradigm where artists defined themselves against the Neoclassical standards of their predecessors, with Bouguereau's neoclassical work being disdained. He once reprimanded one of his students, Henri Matisse, for not being able to draw, while another time he would describe a fussy, overwrought painting as "bouguerated". The same counter-cultural forces pushed back against the reputation of Bouguereau's Neoclassical contemporaries.
Bouguereau clearly had a pragmatic attitude to the sentimental paintings which he produced with factory-line efficiency. These were paintings for a market that wanted images of stylized feminine beauty, titillating mythology, rustic country life, and childhood innocence. These paintings were for the market, composed in response to a clamor for images of stylized feminine beauty, titillating mythology, rustic country life, and childhood innocence. Although Bouguereau's reputation as a bastion of bourgeois taste meant that the more progressive aspects of his life and work were overlooked, he was admired by some progressive critics. He was especially passionate about mentoring young artists at the Académie Julian, for example. He was also much more encouraging towards women artists than other artists were at the time.
In the 1970s-80s, there was renewed interest in Bouguereau's work, with major exhibitions in New York, Montreal, and Paris. His influence on 19th-century art in France and in the United States was examined in various monographs and revisionary academic articles around the same time. His paintings now sell for a lot of money at auction and continue to circulate among private collectors. Many of his works also appear on greetings cards, posters, and calendars, including the famous The First Kiss, which has been widely distributed without the artist's name becoming more famous.
