Catching Butterflies

Hugues Merle was just two years older than his friend and rival, William Adolphe Bouguereau (see lots 101 and 106). The two artists favored a highly finished technique and their work often shared thematic and stylistic similarities that begged comparision from critics and collectors alike. Indeed, it has been said that Bouguereau was even asked to paint a commission for the American collector Robert L. Stuart that was based on Merle's 1867 picture The Woman and the Secret. Merle's fame extended abroad and almost no important American collection at the end of the century was without at least one picture by the artist. In Edward Strahan's 1878-79 compendium Art Treasures of America no less than fifty-two of Merle's paintings are listed, including another version of Catching Butterflies in the collection of A. E. Borie (pp. 83, 93)