Portrait of Gabrielle Cot Bouguereau

Portrait of Gabrielle Cot by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1890, is an oil on canvas painting of the daughter of Bouguereau’s student, the academic classical painter Pierre Auguste Cot. The smooth treatment of the woman’s features, hair and fleecy white dress demonstrate Bouguereau’s talent for idealizing and beautifying his subjects while maintaining a very human likeness. 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.