Girl With Pomegranate by Bouguereau Postcard

Girl With a Pomegranate by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1875, is an oil on canvas painting of a solemn young woman in exotic, colorful Arabic or Moroccan headdress and veils, holding a fruit. This smooth, polished, realistic academic canvas shows the 19th century fascination with Orientalism, the study of Eastern and North African cultures. 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 quasi-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.