William-Adolphe Bouguereau · 1825–1905
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) was a leading painter of French academic art. He won the Prix de Rome in 1850 and painted mythological subjects with precise description and a polished surface.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau is, with Alexandre Cabanel, a leading painter of academic art of his time. A pupil of the Neoclassical painter Picot, he won the Prix de Rome in 1850 and exhibited large history and mythological paintings at the Salon.
Among his mythological masterpieces, The Birth of Venus (1879, Musée d'Orsay) and The Childhood of Bacchus (1884, private collection, Paris) are well known. His style, marked by precise description that reproduces even subtle light and shade and by a polished surface, is said to be the height of academic realist technique. In Japan, The Fisherman's Daughter is held.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau was born on November 30, 1825 and died on August 19, 1905.
