The Storm

William Bouguereau was the most successful painter in France for much of the nineteenth century and has spent the century since being argued about. His technique is not in question: the drawing is exact, the surfaces are smooth to the point of invisibility, and the figures are modelled with a control very few painters have matched. What divides people is the content. Peasant girls, bathers, nymphs and Madonnas, painted with a sweetness that the modernists found unbearable and dismissed as kitsch. He fought the Impressionists directly, using his influence at the Salon against them, and they returned the compliment by writing him out of the story. He taught at the Académie Julian and, unusually for the period, pushed for women to be admitted to art training. Prices collapsed after his death and stayed low for decades. They have since recovered sharply, which says as much about shifting taste as it does about the paintings.