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拍品專文
By the time William Bouguereau painted La grande soeur, his reputation as the foremost French Academic painter was firmly established both in Europe and the United States. Having won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1850, Bouguereau went on to become a fixture at the Paris Salons, a teacher at the influential Académie Julian and one of the most commercially successful artists of the period, due in large part to his representation by the powerful dealers Paul Durand-Ruel and later Adolphe Goupil. It was Durand-Ruel who encouraged Bouguereau to make the pivotal shift in his work away from religious and mythological subjects towards the more popular compositions of provincial women and children.
During the Second Empire, idealized images of France's rural society became enormously popular among the art-buying public. Artists such as Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton produced a genre of painting that celebrated the country's peasantry as hardworking, dignified people, far removed from those living in cosmopolitan cities for whom their works were intended. While Bouguereau's work from the 1850s onward followed in this tradition, the artist developed a more idealized vision of rural life than that of his predecessors. In contrast to Millet's and Breton's paintings, which often show their subjects actively laboring in fields, Bouguereau's peasants enjoy a far easier existence. His young women and children frequently appear seated with time to engage in familial affection or simple idleness. While such idyllic scenes would seem to suggest that the artist was unfamiliar with the realities of rural life, Bouguereau in fact grew up in Brittany, a region culturally distant from urbane Paris. Even as he achieved international success, his heart remained in Brittany and he returned there regularly to escape from the pressures of Paris. There in the countryside, Bouguereau chose his models from among the local population and produced some of his most successful works.
La grande soeur is a tender depiction of one of Bouguereau's favorite subjects: the interaction between two sisters, one a poised adolescent and the other a squirming toddler. The intimate act of the older girl trying to hold the baby on her lap while putting on her stocking adds an authentic informality to the painting not found in similar compositions. A virtuoso at rendering hands and feet, Bouguereau demonstrated his extraordinary abilities in full view in this work, particularly in the older girl's complicated clasp around her sister. More striking still is the small child’s luminescent skin, which appears all the more radiant set against the dark blue of the older sister’s dress. Above all, however, it is the younger child’s gaze that is the most engaging aspect of the painting. As in the best examples of the artist's work, in La grande soeur the little girl looks intently at the viewer as if inviting us into the bucolic world that Bouguereau loved so deeply.
La grande soeur was exhibited at the Exposition universelle of 1878 along with eleven of Bouguereau’s most admired works, including the monumental Charité. This exhibition was conceived as a ten-year retrospective intended to showcase to the world France’s achievements in the fine arts since the last Exposition universelle of 1867. Because of the numerous paintings Bouguereau exhibited there, he only contributed one painting, a portrait, to the Salon of 1878.
During the Second Empire, idealized images of France's rural society became enormously popular among the art-buying public. Artists such as Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton produced a genre of painting that celebrated the country's peasantry as hardworking, dignified people, far removed from those living in cosmopolitan cities for whom their works were intended. While Bouguereau's work from the 1850s onward followed in this tradition, the artist developed a more idealized vision of rural life than that of his predecessors. In contrast to Millet's and Breton's paintings, which often show their subjects actively laboring in fields, Bouguereau's peasants enjoy a far easier existence. His young women and children frequently appear seated with time to engage in familial affection or simple idleness. While such idyllic scenes would seem to suggest that the artist was unfamiliar with the realities of rural life, Bouguereau in fact grew up in Brittany, a region culturally distant from urbane Paris. Even as he achieved international success, his heart remained in Brittany and he returned there regularly to escape from the pressures of Paris. There in the countryside, Bouguereau chose his models from among the local population and produced some of his most successful works.
La grande soeur is a tender depiction of one of Bouguereau's favorite subjects: the interaction between two sisters, one a poised adolescent and the other a squirming toddler. The intimate act of the older girl trying to hold the baby on her lap while putting on her stocking adds an authentic informality to the painting not found in similar compositions. A virtuoso at rendering hands and feet, Bouguereau demonstrated his extraordinary abilities in full view in this work, particularly in the older girl's complicated clasp around her sister. More striking still is the small child’s luminescent skin, which appears all the more radiant set against the dark blue of the older sister’s dress. Above all, however, it is the younger child’s gaze that is the most engaging aspect of the painting. As in the best examples of the artist's work, in La grande soeur the little girl looks intently at the viewer as if inviting us into the bucolic world that Bouguereau loved so deeply.
La grande soeur was exhibited at the Exposition universelle of 1878 along with eleven of Bouguereau’s most admired works, including the monumental Charité. This exhibition was conceived as a ten-year retrospective intended to showcase to the world France’s achievements in the fine arts since the last Exposition universelle of 1867. Because of the numerous paintings Bouguereau exhibited there, he only contributed one painting, a portrait, to the Salon of 1878.