William Bouguereau

Goupil & Cie., Paris (acquired directly from the artist, July 27, 1866)
M. Wallis, London (acquired from the above, September 2, 1866)
H. & P. Casseres, London
Grandfather of the present owner (acquired from the above circa 1910)
Thence by descent

This work is the half-size réduction Bouguereau made of the painting he exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1866, today in the Lyndhurst Collection, Tarrytown, New York, and measuring 75 by 50 in. (190 by 127.5 cm).

During his early career, Bouguereau was regularly asked to paint réductions of his most important works.  Jules Goupil, his exclusive dealer from 1866 onwards, commissioned these réductions either to provide print-makers with a more manageable-sized canvas to copy (there was a ready market, especially in America, for Bouguereau's prints), or to satisfy the demands of avid collectors wishing to acquire the no-longer-available original.

The present réduction served as the blueprint for a chromolithograph measuring 37 1/3 by 24 in. (95 by 61 cm) drawn by Schulz, and printed by Hangard & Maugé for publication by the Goupil Gallery starting in 1868.  Unlike many of his later réductions, it is clear that Bouguereau worked alone on the present work.  His account books, but more importantly the perfection of line and color, rule out every possibility of the presence of workshop involvement.

The present work clearly shows the influence of Raphäel, for whom the expression of beauty was the purest homage man could pay to God and humanity, and whom Bouguereau revered.  With his paintings owing as much to the sacred as to the profane, Bouguereau's choice of the simple and innocent lives of Roman peasants as his subjects eloquently served his artistic aims.  In Premières Caresses, the parallels between mother and baby and the Virgin and Child are unmistakable.

Premières Caresses also celebrates feminine beauty, an ideal which manifests itself throughout Bouguereau's oeuvre.  His mothers and Madonnas are of the same lineage as his nymphs and goddesses, blessed with the same pure flesh and embodying the same magnified, exalted beauty.  The painting also bears witness to the family values Bouguereau held dear, to the familial love of which he himself was deprived due to the early death of his parents.

Marc de Montifaud in his review of the 1866 Salon wrote of the composition, "Nothing could be more seductive, more supple, more correct than the fluent lines of Premières Caresses, in which the eyelids of the young woman, so warm in tone and character, have an irresistible softness directed at the naked plump child who has just been lifted from his cradle; his flesh has the qualities of a sculpture, displays a harmony of tonalities, is soft as worked clay, and has a roundness that has nowhere been better observed."