William-Adolphe Bouguereau Art Prints

Born in La Rochelle to a family of wine and olive oil merchants, he was first sent to train for the priesthood, and learned to draw at college from a former pupil of Ingres. To pay for the move to Paris he painted 33 portraits in three months. In Paris he chased the Prix de Rome three years running: Dante and Virgil in Hell (1850), with its two damned souls locked in a biting fight, was his third attempt and did not win. Later that year he shared first prize and went to Rome, where he studied the old masters, Raphael among his favourites.

He showed at the Paris Salon every year of his working life, often finished twenty or more easel paintings a year, and taught hundreds of students at the Académie Julian. American millionaires bought him eagerly. Nymphs and Satyr, sold in 1873 to an American collector, later hung in the bar of the Hoffman House Hotel; look for the satyr's one wet hoof as the nymphs try to drag him into the cold pond.

His skin, hands and feet were especially admired, and he worked up every composition through careful pencil studies and oil sketches. In The Birth of Venus (1879), a canvas over three metres high, Venus stands on a scallop shell drawn by a dolphin; check the clouds at upper left for a shadow that looks like the painter himself, brush raised. The Elder Sister (1869) used his own daughter Henriette and son Paul as models.

Private grief ran under the polish: he outlived four of his five children, and painted The First Mourning, Adam and Eve over the body of Abel, shortly after losing his second son. He was candid about the market too. “You have to follow public taste,” he said in 1891. He died in La Rochelle in 1905.