Now at Main Library, 2nd Floor

 

 

The current display of the Women Month of March 2012 at the Cabell County Public Library honors William Bouguereau for his historical role helping opening the door of French art institute s for women artists.

Bouguereau was the consummate academician and ranked among the most commercially successful painters of the 19th century. His popularity rested, in large part, on his technical facility, his ability to create paintings whose polished surfaces, nuanced lighting, and delicate tints achieve an almost photographic verisimilitude. One of his favorite motifs was the idealized peasant girl dreamily engaged in various rustic activities. The innocence and simple grace of this subject (who appears far cleaner than her real-life counterparts would have been) epitomize the sentimental, non-threatening peasant archetype preferred by Bouguereau's upper-class patrons. His figures resound with echoes of ancient Greek and Roman statuary (which he studied for several years in the Eternal City after winning the Prix de Rome in 1850), as well as the neoclassicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), whose famous painting of a nude nymph entitled The Source (1856, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) served as a direct antecedent for The Water Girl.

 

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