William Bouguereau

Louis Marcotte de Quiviéres (acquired directly from the artist)
Sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, April 24, 1875 (titled Joies maternelle) 
George Whitney
Richard & Cie.
T.T. Kinney (sold: American Art Association Inc., New York, March 7, 1911, lot 46)
Franklin Murphy, New York (acquired at the above sale)
Kende Galleries, New York
Andrew L. Stone, Los Angeles (acquired from the above on December 12, 1946)
Newhouse Gallery, New York (acquired from the above in October, 1947)
Ransom Galleries, Oklahoma City
Private Midwestern Collection (acquired from the above in October, 1959)
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, May 23, 1996, lot 137, illustrated
Private Collection
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, October 28, 2003, lot 38, illustrated
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Franqueville, William Bouguereau, 1864, p. 370
Ludovic Baschet, Catalogue illustré des oeuvres de W. Bouguereau, Paris, 1885, p. 27, illustrated
Marius Vachon, W. Bouguereau, Paris, 1900, pp. 92-95, 147
Mark Steven Walker, A Summary Catalogue of the Paintings, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, L'Art Pompier, New York, 1991, p. 66

Together with his friend Paul Baudry, William Bouguereau won the Grand Prix de Rome of 1850, allowing him to spend from January 1851 until the end of April 1854 at the Villa Medici.  This trip was to affect the artist deeply throughout his career, and his monumental female figures were often drawn in subsequent years from the classical Italian model.  Bouguereau's diary tells us that throughout his time at the Villa Medici, he made hundreds of sketches of regional costumes.  Upon his return to France, Bouguereau found in these sketches the material and the compositional ideas for a series of works including this one, which counts among the most fundamentally important in Bouguereau's oeuvre from the 1860's. 

In his 1900 biography, Marius Vachon describes Bouguereau's mother and child pictured as reminiscent of the Quattrocento Italian paintings of the Madonna and Child, particularly those of Raphaël, which were always close to Bouguereau's heart: "From the outset, the paintings of the Italian masters have revealed to the artist the beauty inherent in youth, the seduction in a smile, the grace in simplicity.  Above all he paints young mothers with their children.  This theme, which was interpreted in an inexhaustible variety of ways, and always with new eloquence, has inspired him to paint works of infinite charm, in which the figure types have generally been borrowed from the Italians.  In La Baiser, one sees a woman sitting on a stone bench, a small toddler kisses her tenderly, grateful for the orange that she just gave her..." (Vachon, pp. 92-95) (Undoubtably Vachon was working from a black and white print as he confused the basin with a stone bench).  The extraordinary delicacy and flawlessness of the draughtsmanship in Le Baiser lends a most tender interpretation to the mother and child theme.  The classical rendering of the subject, the exquisite colors and the soft, palpable rendering of the flesh sets this work apart from so many other mother and child compositions.