William Bouguereau

Goupil & Cie, Paris (acquired directly from the artist on 10 November 1866)
Theo van Gogh, Amsterdam (acquired from Goupil's Amsterdam branch on 30 December 1866)
Possibly Private Collection (sale: Christie's, London, 12 March 1880, lot 109)
Possibly Thomas Agnew & Sons, London
Possibly Samuel P. Avery, New York
Mary Radcliffe (sale: Christie's, London, 22 February 1908, lot 30)
Bernheim-Jeune et Cie., Paris (as Maternité)
Mrs. Escudero, Buenos Aires
Sale: Adolfo Bullrich y Cia, Buenos Aires, 14 November 1973, lot 20 (as Maternidad)
Hammer Galleries, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Joseph M. Tanenbaum, Toronto (by 1975; sale: Sotheby's, New York, 16 February 1995, lot 73)
West Coast Private Collection (purchased at the above sale; sale: Christie's, New York, 23 April 2003, lot 9)
Italian Private Collection (purchased at the above sale; sale: Sotheby's, New York, 9 May 2013, lot 15)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Damien Bartoli with Frederick C. Ross, William Bouguereau, Catalogue Raisonné of His Painted Work, New York, 2010, p. 78, no. 1864/03A, illustrated

This réplique of Bouguereau's Le Sommeil, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1864, exemplifies Bouguereau's poised yet tender figure groups inspired by, and in the tradition of, the Renaissance masters Titian and Raphael.

While the Salon painting presents the figure group in a sunlit courtyard, here Bouguereau has chosen to place the family in a softly-lit interior beside a staircase, adding a still life to the left. While there are no overt religious references in either painting, the image of the mother and children can be interpreted as a secular portrayal of the Holy Family, in this instance dressed as Italian peasants. Critics of the day recognised the influence of earlier religious works on this secularized subject. Theophile Gautier declared 'There is a great deal of charm in this maternal grouping, which could easily become a Sainte Famille' and Paul de Saint-Victor described it as 'three white figures, composed and grouped like a working-class Holy Family' (Ludovic Baschet, Catalogue illustré des oeuvres de W. Bouguereau, Paris, 1889, p. 28). Indeed, Bouguereau’s own Sainte Famille of 1863, painted the year before and which belonged to the Imperial Family and hung in the Palais des Tuileries, clearly provided the inspiration for Le Sommeil.

After receiving the esteemed Prix de Rome in 1850, Bouguereau spent four years in Italy studying the works of Giotto and Raphael, whom he most revered. The plasticity in the modeling that Bouguereau, the consummate academic, achieves in Le Sommeil recalls the surfaces and articulations of the saints of the great masters of the cinquecento.