Fraternal Love by William-Adolphe Bouguereau Postcard

Fraternal Love by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1851, is an academic French oil on canvas painting of a mother with two children expressing affection. The composition is based on numerous Madonna and child paintings of the Renaissance, secularized and placed in a serene, realistic French landscape, echoing the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus and Saint John as painted by Raphael and other Renaissance masters. William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825 - 1905) was a French painter who trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and the Villa Medici in Rome. He exhibited with great success in the French Salon and became one of most renowned and wealthy artists of his era. Bouguereau worked in the French Academic tradition, a school of late 19th century modern painters who concentrated on the human figure and classical subjects in highly polished works of optical realism. His main interest was the female figure, usually rendered in classical, finely drawn contours, in subjects that were often sentimental. Bouguereau's reputation diminished greatly in the 20th century with the rise of Modernism, but interest in his traditional figurative paintings has surged again in recent years.