The Bathers by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

The Bathers by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1884, is an oil on canvas painting of two female figures on a rocky French beach landscape scene. Painted from life, the pale, buoyant figures are as tranquil as the pale sky of the seascape, based on classical and Renaissance sources yet realist in execution. Paintings such as The Bathers assured Bouguereau’s enormous popularity in Europe and America in the 19th century. 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.