Nymphs and Satyr, 1873, oil on canvas, 260 × 180 cm (102.4 × 70.9 in), Clark Art Instituteīouguereau, painting within the traditional academic style, exhibited at the annual exhibitions of the Paris Salon for his entire working life. In April 1854, he left Rome and returned to La Rochelle. Although he had a strong admiration for all traditional art, he particularly revered Greek sculpture, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Rubens and Delacroix. Still based in Rome and working hard on course work, there were more explorations of Italy in 1852. He walked to Naples and on to Capri, Amalfi and Pompeii. He also studied classical literature, which influenced his subject choice for the rest of his career. Bouguereau explored the city, making sketches and watercolours as he went. Īlong with other category winners, he set off for Rome in December and finally arrived at the Villa Medici in January 1851. His third attempt commenced unsuccessfully in April 1850 with Dante and Virgil but five months later, he heard he had won a joint first prize for Shepherds Find Zenobia on the Banks of the Araxes. Following 106 days of competition, he again failed to win. After an unsuccessful attempt to win the prize, he entered again in 1849. Soon after work began there were riots in Paris, and Bouguereau enrolled in the National Guard. The young artist entered the Prix de Rome contest in April 1848. Academic painting placed the highest status on historical and mythological subjects, and Bouguereau determined to win the Prix de Rome, which would gain him a three-year residence at the Villa Medici in Rome, Italy, where in addition to formal lessons he could study at first hand the Renaissance artists and their masterpieces, as well as Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities. Dante and Virgil in Hell (1850) was an early example of his neo-classical works. He was admitted to the studio of François-Édouard Picot, where he studied painting in the academic style.

To supplement his formal training in drawing, he attended anatomical dissections and studied historical costumes and archeology. īouguereau became a student at the École des Beaux-Arts. Equality is Bouguereau's first major painting, produced after two years at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris at the age of 23. Égalité devant la mort ( Equality Before Death), 1848, oil on canvas, 141 × 269 cm (55.5 × 105.9 in), Musée d'Orsay, Paris. He arrived in Paris in March 1846, aged twenty. In 1845, he returned to Mortagne to spend more time with his uncle. All were unsigned and only one has been traced. To fund the move, he sold portraits – 33 oils in three months. He was soon the best pupil in his class, and decided to become an artist in Paris. Bouguereau also worked as a shop assistant, hand-colouring lithographs and making small paintings that were reproduced using chromolithography. There he met a local artist, Charles Marionneau, and commenced at the Municipal School of Drawing and Painting in November 1841. Bouguereau reluctantly left his studies to return to his family, now residing in Bordeaux. Here he was taught to draw and paint by Louis Sage, who had studied under Ingres.

In 1839, he was sent to study for the priesthood at a Catholic college in Pons. At the age of twelve, Bouguereau went to Mortagne-sur-Gironde to stay with his uncle Eugène, a priest, and developed a love of nature, religion and literature. The family moved to Saint-Martin-de-Ré in 1832. He had an elder brother, Alfred, and a younger sister, Marie (known as Hanna), who died when she was seven.

The son of Théodore Bouguereau (born 1800) and Marie Bonnin (1804), known as Adeline, William was brought up a Catholic. William-Adolphe Bouguereau was born in La Rochelle, France, on 30 November 1825, into a family of wine and olive oil merchants.

Whisperings of love painting