Pieta by Bouguereau Postcard

Pieta by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1876, is a large oil on canvas painting of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead Christ in her arms, surrounded by a host of weeping angels. The dark, somber tones and smooth, painstaking academic technique produce a powerful religious image of lamentation and remorse. Bouguereau adds the archaic forms of the flattened, gold leaf halos on the heads of Jesus and Mary, as well as the classical urn in the foreground, connecting his powerful Pietà to its predecessor works of art from the Byzantine, Medieval and Renaissance eras. 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.