William Bouguereau

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) was the most celebrated French painter of his generation and the defining figure of academic art at the Paris Salon. After winning the Prix de Rome in 1850 he built a career on mythological and religious subjects, idealised nudes and tender studies of peasant children, painted with a polished, almost photographic finish. Works such as Nymphs and Satyr, The Birth of Venus and Dante and Virgil made him wealthy and enormously popular with American collectors. The Impressionists attacked him as everything modern art should reject, and after his death his reputation collapsed for most of the twentieth century. Serious reappraisal began in the 1970s, and his paintings are now collected and exhibited again. This archive holds high-resolution scans of his work, free to preview and available as originals for printing.