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 HE VICTORIAN ARTISTS like Waterhouse, Burne-Jones and Bouguereau loved and admired women. It's no coincidence that women's rights were championed openly for the first time during this era, and incrementally over the next 100 years, to be nearly equalized (for the first time in history) with those of men. Louis Sonolet, wrote in the October 1907 issue of Masters in Art "A Series of Illustrated Monographs", page 28:
Bouguereau's first wife was a French woman, who died early in their married life. In 1896 he married Miss Elizabeth Gardner, of Exeter, New Hampshire, a painter of recognized ability, who had been one of his pupils in the Julian art schools. It was due to Bouguereau's efforts, himself influenced thereto by his American fiancée, that both the Julian studios and the École des Beaux-Arts broke their hitherto cast-iron regulations and admitted women as students to their classes.
Bouguereau also celebrated humanity's culture and literature in his paintings, as seen in his mythological scenes of nymphs, cupids, satyrs and his scenes from the Bible. These wholly original compositions are handled with an emotional force second to none. The Flagellation and First Mourning (Adam and Eve grieving the death of Abel) are both consummate masterpieces of this type, with figures painted so lifelike that you feel you're looking through a window at an event frozen in time. One can sense the blood rushing in their veins and the life in their eyes, accomplishments for which no words can do justice.
Even beyond this, he captured the very souls and spirits of his subjects. They come to life like no previous artist has ever before or ever since achieved. He didn't just paint their flesh better; he captured the subtlest tender nuances of personality and mood. He took no short cuts.
Every composition is incredibly original with perspectives and foreshortening and interweaving of figures more complex and successful than of any other artist of his time. His paintings never feel busy. There are never unnecessary elements strewn around. The landscaping is rendered just enough to focus the viewer's attention on the figure. He masterfully brought together the elements of exquisite drawing, incredible coloration, perspective, brilliant modeling and composition, all working together in harmony. All elements reinforce the emotional thrust of each work. To achieve this, he developed his own idiosyncratic techniques, often creating new methods on the spot to solve an immediate problem. There have been extensive analytic treatises written by a number of recent scholars trying to technically dissect how Bouguereau managed his totally unique magic.
It was the artist's goal to show humanity as beautifully real and ideal as possible, encouraging all to strive for such ideals. The message is that while mankind may not be perfect, life can still be good. Implicit is the moral imperative that all people are worthy of love and respect. So not only was it untrue that Bouguereau, Burne-Jones, Alma-Tadema and their brethren were irrelevant; the exact opposite was the case. He and the other academic artists were at the cutting edge of the changes that were occurring in Western civilization, asserting that each individual was unique and valuable. Only a society such as this could generate people who would even be permitted to dribble paint on a canvas and call it a work of art. A hundred years earlier, somebody trying to do that would probably have been thrown into an institution or worse. We must realize that modern art could never have existed save on the back of the Humanist art that preceded it. One can't help but be struck by the irony that the chief benefactors of these "liberated" and "enlightened" artists are their chief detractors. The knife of ingratitude cuts deep.
The next myth perpetuated about Bouguereau by his critics was that he painted just for the bourgeois in order to get rich.
Let's dispel that once and for all. He prided himself in never needing to take commissions. He painted what he loved and believed, often laboring 16 hours a day, seven days a week, much like Michelangelo. His fame became so great that his dealer, Goupil, was able to charge $10,000 for a single canvas (equivalent to more than $300,000 today). The bourgeois couldn't possibly buy his paintings, and they were eagerly acquired by the wealthy Mellons, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Carnegies. Let me ask who has been buying Matisse, Picasso and Gauguin, or deKooning, Rothko and Pollock? The Mellons, Vanderbilts and the Carnegies, or their equivalents! I don't hear anyone claiming that these artists painted just for the bourgeois in order to get rich. Certainly Picasso was far wealthier when he died than Bouguereau at his death. Rubens, Gainsborough, Church, Rodin, Boucher, deKooning and Frank Stella all made or are making substantial sums on their art. The fact is that most often, it is the wealthy who buy art. Rather than using this fact to condemn the artists, it should be the basis for praising those individuals who recognized and helped support greatness. What would the Renaissance have been without Lorenzo de Medici?
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Bouguereau captured the very souls and spirits of his subjects. They come to life like no previous artist has ever before or ever since achieved.
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Then again, we should ask what is wrong with being part of the bourgeois? It was their existence more than anything that helped to create our culture as we know it. The bourgeois mostly came from poor roots and rightly felt that they were as worthy of love and respect as the nobility before them.
Some of the best examples of Bouguereau's work are among the greatest masterpieces in Western art. Because his work had been unfairly denigrated, the resulting low prices much of the 20th Century allowed private collectors to acquire or keep his work, including some of his greatest paintings. In the last 20 years, however, his prices have increased astronomically. Paintings that would have sold for $5,000 in 1970, were worth $50,000 in 1980, and would currently sell for over a million. In November of 1998, the world record for Bouguereau was broken twice, with Cupid and Psyche as Children selling for $1,760,000, and Alma Parens, an allegorical painting of mother France nurturing her children, brought $2,650,000 at Sotheby's. Of course, price and quality don't necessarily go hand in hand. But this is a strong indicator of changing perceptions. In Bouguereau's case his work is still undervalued when a Picasso sold the same year for $48,000,000, an Andy Warhol for $17,000,000, and a Van Gogh self portrait for $71,000,000.
Another myth concerns the accusation that most of the work of these traditional Humanists or Academic Realists is just petty sentimentality. In fact, most modernist critics consider any hint of positive human emotions as petty sentimentality. I would agree that an adult's abnormal attachment to a high school ring or cheerleader pompoms is petty sentiment. But, what of the incomparable joy of a child taking his or her first steps? Is there anything more beautiful, and could anything be more fitting subject matter for art? Is this petty sentimentality? What of depicting a young person's first moments of sexual awareness as childhood passes into adulthood? What of the cruelty of the industrial life in the cities with the cold and homeless lining up for bread on a wintry night? This was subject matter that had never been dealt with before and wouldn't have been deemed appropriate in earlier centuries. Of course, many academic artists of the period unsuccessfully tried such subject matter and it often did look over-sentimentalized. But in every period in history most of the work being done was mediocre. That doesn't prevent us from separating the wheat from the chaff. So it was true too in the 19th Century. There were those like Bouguereau and Lord Leighton who pulled it off with poetic brilliance.
If we claim that these works are petty sentimentality, then wouldn't the same logic apply to the great Renaissance artists who attempted to capture the joys of religious exaltation or overly idealized heroism of kings? Or there were 17th Century Dutch artists who painted rigid noblemen or carousing peasants in taverns? Caravaggio and George De La Tour painted fortunetellers and card cheating gypsies. Is this petty sentiment too?
Modernism endeavors to outrage, insult and defile human feelings (i.e., sentiment) and to belittle and dismiss any expression of our sense of passion and beauty as just no more than mere sentiment, and in the next breath want us to think their work is passionate and beautiful. In 1964 the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was offered one of Frederick Church's greatest masterpieces of landscape painting for a mere $30,000.
They dismissed the offer with the comment that they don't buy picture postcards. It was put down specifically due to its appeal to sentiment. Today, the Met has dozens of such works on permanent display in the 19th Century American wing. All the great 19th Century masterpieces that depict universal human emotions of any kind are denigrated and lumped together as only appealing to petty human sentiment. However, it's not just sentiment that was dismissed as worthless, but the depicting of all human emotions.
I'm not saying that there aren't any paintings that are maudlin and overly sentimental from the 19th Century, but the modernists dismiss them all out of hand, whether bad and silly or inspired and brilliant.
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