The Crab by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

The Crab by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1869, is an oil on canvas painting of a little girl on the seashore, playfully poking at the crab in the water with a stick. In the distance fishermen haul in their boat on the sunny beach landscape. The little girl looks wistfully down at the crustacean in the tidal pool, an image of young innocence at play in a remarkable academic realist painting. 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 modern art, but interest in his traditional figurative paintings has surged again in recent years.