In William Bouguereau’s Le réveil, a young mother dressed in Italian costume gingerly holds her baby as he awakens from slumber. At her side, a little girl clasps her hands as if in prayer. Golden light streams over the mother’s shoulder, illuminating the baby’s face and the delicate outline of his outstretched hand, made even more dramatic by the dark room around them. The young blond model for this work is Emilienne Cesil-Biegler (see lot 419). Born in 1859, she was the daughter of Bouguereau's housemaid and, as such, it is likely that Emilienne's brother Henri, born in 1863, may be the model for the infant boy.

Conceived in 1865, Le réveil is known in two sizes, a larger canvas now in a private collection and the present réduction. The year represented an important turning point commercially for Bouguereau, as the death of Jean-Marie Fortuné Durand-Ruel, proprietor of the eponymous gallery in Paris and early champion for the young artist in Paris, led to a new agreement with the savvy Goupil & Cie. His new dealers capitalized on the success of Bouguereau’s most impressive and well-received works, commissioning réductions to satisfy the buying public’s appetite for the works already purchased from the Salon or to provide print makers with a template from which to work.

Compositions that reflected the importance of home and motherhood—tinged with a hint of the sacred—became a favored theme for Bouguereau in the late 1860s, as seen works such as Les oranges (1865, sold in these rooms, May 5, 2011, lot 23), L’invocation á la Vierge (1866, Private Collection) and Premières caresses (1866, Lyndhurst, Tarrytown, New York). The popularity of these compositions is evidenced by the fact that réductions were commissioned of each of them.