William-Adolphe Bouguereau

The most technically polished academic painter of 19th-century France and the Impressionists' most prominent institutional opponent — a figure who now occupies the paradoxical position of being simultaneously celebrated for his craftsmanship and taken as the primary example of everything the Impressionist revolution rejected. Bouguereau was born in La Rochelle, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts under William-Adolphe Picot, won the Prix de Rome in 1850 and spent the standard four-year scholarship in Italy. He returned to Paris, exhibited regularly at the Salon, and quickly established himself as the most technically accomplished figurative painter of the generation. His subjects were mythological and religious nudes — nymphs, Madonnas, allegories of truth and beauty — painted with a surface of near-photographic smoothness. He despised visible brushwork, which he associated with incompetence and laziness, and his finish — the skin of his nudes, the fabric of his drapery, the landscape backgrounds — was the product of elaborate layers of glaze and overpainting that required months of work per canvas. He was spectacularly productive: nearly eight hundred oil paintings in a career of fifty years. He sat on Salon juries and used his position to keep the Impressionists and their sympathizers out; this role as gatekeeper made him the natural villain in the story the Impressionists told about themselves. The 20th century judged him harshly, and his reputation collapsed almost entirely between 1900 and the 1970s. The recovery began with American collectors who found his academic nudes more visually gratifying than they were supposed to, and accelerated as the broader re-evaluation of academic Victorian painting gathered pace. His prices at auction have risen dramatically since the 1980s, and the debate about his work's status — extraordinary craft in the service of conventional idealism — continues.