William Bouguereau

Schweitzer Gallery, Inc., New York
Private American Collection (and sold: Sotheby's, New York, May 23, 1996, lot 139)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

William Bouguereau won the Prix de Rome, his first major artistic accolade, in 1850, and this time spent studying in Italy informed his entire artistic career.  He traveled broadly to see the country’s artistic treasures, and his endless pursuit of knowledge and voracious appetite for art earned his the nickname of “Sisyphus” back in Rome.  One of the artist’s most significant influences while in Italy and thereafter were the works of Raphael.  In fact, the first painting by Bouguereau ever shipped to America (where the artist found one of his most welcome receptions among collectors, and still does today) was Fraternal Love, 1851 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).  Though the artist gave it a secular title, and the work does not include any overt religious imagery, its American audience saw the dominant mother figure dressed in blue (the Virgin’s symbolic color) holding her blond baby, who serenely embraces a slightly older child, and immediately retitled it Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist.  The picture certainly takes as its departure point Raphael’s monumental figures and triangular compositions, and was heralded as a triumph as soon as it reached the United States by 1869, where it entered the collection of Thomas Wigglesworth of Boston.

In the present work, the sitter holds a prayer book, echoing Bouguereau’s love for Raphael and his preference for a secular interpretation of a traditionally overt religious theme.  Books of Hours were illustrated prayer books, and from the medieval era onward, were commissioned by wealthy patrons for daily devotional use.  The basic format for a Book of Hours is the inclusion of thirty-seven prayers to the Virgin Mary, to be recited sequentially throughout each day.  The application to the Virgin may be the reason that when seen in portraiture, Books of Hours were most often held by a female sitter, and symbolized virtue and contemplation.

While using a traditional symbol of chastity and respectability from the Renaissance onward,  Bouguereau has taken this most traditional subject matter and made it his own, dressing his model in the clothing of a Romanticized Italian peasant, and thereby transforming her into a reflection of modernity.