Perhaps no other artist is more synonymous with the Academic Tradition than William Adolphe Bouguereau. This tradition, though stringent in its doctrine and rigorous in its training, ultimately provided fertile ground for Bouguereau's development and sustained him as an artist for over fifty years. The tradition was centuries-old, a three-fold structure consisting of a school, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, an annual exhibition, the Salon des Beaux-Arts, and the Académie des Beaux-Arts, a prestigious society whose member-professors dictated the program of both the Ecole and the Salon. Bouguereau triumphed over the challenges of its notoriously rigorous curriculum, ultimately winning its most coveted award, the Prix de Rome, and, some years later, became professor of the very Ecole that created him. When Bouguereau enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1846, the school stood firmly on its nearly three centuries of artistic training. Established in 1648 by Cardinal Mazarin, the Ecole was the brainchild of the académie royale, a group of twelve artists known as anciens working under the protection of King Louis XVI. The purpose of the Ecole was to guarantee a pool of artists available to decorate royal palaces and paint likenesses of the royalty. The anciens determined the Ecole's pedagogical approach based on the ideals of Classical Greece and Rome, filling the Ecole, which was then housed in the Louvre, with plaster casts and marble statues of Classical heroes - gods, goddesses, athletes and warriors (fig. 1). Great emphasis was placed on the drawing before any of the students was allowed to progress to painting. Students copied from the plaster casts in order to master the the art of drawing and reproduce the human form in its most ideal state. A rather buxom marble sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite was a favorite of the students, as they routinely slapped its buttocks for good luck. Advancement through the Ecole was accomplished not by tests or exams but by a series of contests, or concours, the most prestigious of which was the Grand Prix (later known as the Prix de Rome). Winning the Grand Prix all but assured a young artist's career. The contest was limited to eight students each year, who were required to work in strict isolation in specially-designed cubicles called loges constructed by the Ecole. While en loge, each student prepared his work from memory based on a topic assigned by a committee of professors. The topics were usually based on biblical stories, historical epics or classical mythology. At the end of seventy days, the students presented their work unsigned to a blind jury made up of the Académie's most esteemed members. Bouguereau was awarded the Grand Prix in September 1850 with the painting Zaenobie retrouvie par les bergers sur les bords de l'Araxe (Zenobia Found by Shepherds on the Shore of the Araxes). Winning the coveted Prix allowed him to spend the next three and one-half years in the glorious Villa des Medicis in Rome, during which time he fully immersed himself in the treasures of the Italian Renaissance as well as traveled widely throughout the country, to Florence, Bologna, Sienna and elsewhere. When Bouguereau returned from his sojourn in Italy, his reputation as one of the Ecole's leading artists was already established. He began submitting his work to the Salon des Beaux-Arts on a regular basis, and would do so nearly every year until his death in 1905, leaving an astounding body of work that encompassed over seven hundred finished paintings. Greatly respected by his fellow artists, Bouguereau was elected president of the painting section of the Salon in 1881. In 1883, he was elected president of the Society of Painters, Architects, Sculptors, Engravers and Designers, a society formed to help struggling artists, and he retained this position until his death. His influence upon a generation of artists was thereby secured. This influence spread through his teaching of drawing at the Ecole, a position he was awarded in 1888. In 1875, he began teaching at the Acdemie Julien, an art school independent of the Ecole, which enabled the master to influence an even broader spectrum of students. Bouguereau's influence upon the art education in France in the second half of the 19th Century cannot be underestimated and many of the most-talented artists of the period were indebted to the great artist. We are pleased to offer here a diverse group of pictures by the master of Academic painting, and well as examples by other artists perhaps slightly less-known but certainly inspired by the Academic tradition. The group of paintings by Bouguereau presented here span his oeuvre from 1865 to 1898, truly the height of the artist's career, and they vary in subject matter from a majestic nude to a Classical fantasy painting to a sweet rendition of family life to an angelic sketch of a small child. Such themes were important to the artist, and were taken up by those who followed him. In the works presented here, we see that the artist was not only the master of the human form, (Le jour), but also a skilled landscapist (Jeannie), adept at the artistic impact of light and shadow (Le reveil) and steeped in the Classical tradition (Inspiration, Secrets d'amour). Bouguereau's influence was pervasive, and we clearly see the impact of the master on other artists of the time, particularly Hughes Merle, represented here with Jeune fille et enfant endormie, and Leon Perrault whose Jeune mere et enfant endormie owes much to the mother and child images so important to Bouguereau (Le reveil). Leon Bonnat, a great admirer and rival to Bouguereau, in Samson's Youth has taken on the technique of the master as well as his Classical subject matter. Guillaume Seignac, another student of Bouguereau, clearly demonstrates the influence of the older artist's fantasy pictures in Cupid and Psyche. (fig.1) Bouguereau in his studio. (fig.2) The Paris Salon of 1880, Photo Courtesy: Musée d'Orsay, Paris. PROPERTY FROM A EUROPEAN COLLECTION

Leon Jean Basile Perrault (French, 1832-1908)

Jeune mère et enfant endormi

Details

Leon Jean Basile Perrault (French, 1832-1908)
Jeune mère et enfant endormi
signed and dated 'L-Perrault. 97' (lower right)
oil on canvas, unframed
38 x 56 in. (97 x 142 cm.)
Painted in 1897

Lot Essay

Born on 20 June 1832 in Poitiers, Leon Perrault studied under François-Edouard Picot and his close friend William Bouguereau. He debuted at the Paris Salon in 1861, receiving medals in 1864, 1876, 1878 and was made a chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 1887.

Like Picot and Bouguereau, Perrault was a master of the Academic style and in the tradition of Bouguereau, his subjects are highly idealized, whether taken from mythology or from scenes of the life of the French peasants.

The artist's career began during the period of the Second Empire, the time of the 1848 social and political upheaval, the result of which was a public that responded to paintings of idealized beauty in order to escape from the trauma of the recent past. As a result works by Academic artists such as Bouguereau, Cabanel and Perrault were in great demand. Images of children in particular fulfilled this need and were greatly sought-after and a large portion of Perrault's oeuvre is dedicated to the depiction of children. A contemporary writer noted of the artist's particular achievement in this genre, '... it is not extravagant to add that no painter of children, from the time of Albano to the present day, has more perfectly rendered the inner structure and subtle modeling of surface, the peculiar quality and graceful action of a child, in perfect physical beauty and health; and all artists know that children are the most difficult of subjects. ('The Child in Art: Perrault's Le Reveil d'Amour', The Century, vol. 46, (6), p. A2).

Jeune mere et enfant endormie is an exquisite example of the paintings for which Perrault was so greatly admired. The subject matter is tranquil: a young mother (or older sister) and her child are at rest after picking apples, the child asleep across the mother's lap with his trophy clutched in his little hand. The young mother gazes at her sleeping child in serene adoration, cradling his head carefully with her hand entwined in his curls. Her own fatigue subtly depicted in the simple rendering of her arm resting on the bale of hay. The child is a tour-de-force of painting: the artist has successfully rendered the total abandon of childlike sleep in the arm thrown behind the head and the limp limbs simply flung out from the body. The artist clearly understands that children fall asleep instantly, and Perrault has captured this spontaneity perfectly in this painting.

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