46 Facts About William-Adolphe Bouguereau

William-Adolphe Bouguereau finished 822 known paintings, but the whereabouts of many are still unknown.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau was born in La Rochelle, France, on 30 November 1825, into a family of wine and olive oil merchants.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau had an elder brother, Alfred, and a younger sister, Marie, who died when she was seven.

At the age of twelve, William-Adolphe Bouguereau went to Mortagne-sur-Gironde to stay with his uncle Eugene, a priest, and developed a love of nature, religion, and literature.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau worked as a shop assistant, hand-colouring lithographs and making small paintings that were reproduced using chromolithography.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau was the best pupil in his class and decided to become an artist in Paris.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau arrived in Paris in March 1846, aged twenty.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau was admitted to the studio of Francois-Edouard Picot, where he studied painting in the academic style.

Academic painting placed the highest status on historical and mythological subjects and William-Adolphe Bouguereau determined to win the, which would gain him a three-year residence at the Villa Medici in Rome, Italy, where, in addition taking formal lessons, he could study firsthand the Renaissance artists and their masterpieces, as well as Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau explored the city, making sketches and watercolours as he went.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau studied classical literature, which influenced his subject choice for the rest of his career.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau walked to Naples and on to Capri, Amalfi, and Pompeii.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, painting within the traditional academic style, exhibited at the annual exhibitions of the Paris Salon for his entire working life.

The eurythmie of the human body preoccupies him, and in recalling the happy results which, in this genre, the ancients and the artists of the sixteenth century arrived at, one can only congratulate M Bouguereau in attempting to follow in their footsteps.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau had fulfilled one of the requirements of the by completing an old-master copy of Raphael's The Triumph of Galatea.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau was revered in the town of his birth and undertook decorating commissions from local citizens.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau was happy to undertake other commissions to pay off the debts he accrued in Italy and to help his penniless mother.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau decorated a mansion with nine large paintings of allegorical figures.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau received the Legion of Honour on 12 July 1859.

Thanks to Durand-Ruel, William-Adolphe Bouguereau met Hugues Merle, who later often was compared to William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

At the behest of King William III of the Netherlands, William-Adolphe Bouguereau went to Het Loo Palace in May 1876.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau found and borrowed twelve of his paintings from their owners, including his new work Nymphaeum.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a staunch traditionalist whose genre paintings and mythological themes were modern interpretations of Classical subjects, both pagan and Christian, with a concentration on the naked female form.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau employed traditional methods of working up a painting, including detailed pencil studies and oil sketches, and his careful method resulted in a pleasing and accurate rendering of the human form.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau's painting of skin, hands, and feet was particularly admired.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau used some of the religious and erotic symbolism of the Old Masters, such as the "broken pitcher" which connoted lost innocence.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau received many commissions to decorate private houses and public buildings, and, early on, this added to his prestige and fame.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau made reductions of his public paintings for sale to patrons, of which The Annunciation is an example.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a successful portrait painter and many of his paintings of wealthy patrons remain in private hands.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau married his famous pupil, Elizabeth Jane Gardner, after the death of his first wife.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau received many honors from the Academy: he became a Life Member in 1876; received the Grand Medal of Honour in 1885; was appointed Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1885; and was made Grand Officier of the Legion of Honour in 1905.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau began to teach drawing at the in 1875.

In mourning, the couple went to La Rochelle, and William-Adolphe Bouguereau made a painting of her in 1868.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau's wife continued to work as his private secretary, and helped to organize the household staff.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau had outlived four of his five children: only Henriette outlived him.

When William-Adolphe Bouguereau arrived in Paris in March 1846, he resided at the Hotel Corneille at 5 rue Corneille.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau spent the rest of his life there and at La Rochelle.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau was an assiduous painter, often completing twenty or more easel paintings in a single year.

On 19 August 1905, aged 79, William-Adolphe Bouguereau died in La Rochelle from heart disease.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau was laid to rest with Nelly and his children at the family vault at Montparnasse Cemetery.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau gained wide fame in Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Romania, and the United States, and commanded high prices.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau's career was nearly a direct ascent with hardly a setback.

Paul Gauguin loathed him, rating him a round zero in Racontars de Rapin and later describing in Avant et apres the single occasion when William-Adolphe Bouguereau made him smile on coming across a couple of his paintings in an Arles brothel, "where they belonged".

William-Adolphe Bouguereau's works were eagerly bought by American millionaires who considered him the most important French artist of that time.

In 1890 William-Adolphe Bouguereau's painting Return of Spring was damaged at a Foreign art exhibition of local artists in Omaha, Nebraska.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau fell into disrepute after 1920, due in part to changing tastes.