Bouguereau made more than seven hundred finished works. French painter. From 1838 to 1841 he took drawing lessons from Louis Sage, a pupil of Ingres, while attending the coll?ge at Pons. In 1841 the family moved to Bordeaux where in 1842 his father allowed him to attend the Ecole Municipale de Dessin et de Peinture part-time, under Jean-Paul Alaux. In 1844 he won the first prize for figure painting, which confirmed his desire to become a painter. As there were insufficient family funds to send him straight to Paris he painted portraits of the local gentry from 1845 to 1846 to earn money. In 1846 he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in the studio of Francois-Edouard Picot. This was the beginning of the standard academic training of which he became so ardent a defender later in life. Such early works as Equality reveal the technical proficiency he had attained even while still training. In 1850 he was awarded one of the two Premier Grand Prix de Rome for Zenobia Discovered by Shepherds on the Bank of the River Araxes (1850; Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.). In December 1850 he left for Rome where he remained at the Villa Medici until 1854, working under Victor Schnetz and Jean Alaux (1786-1864). During this period he made an extensive study of Giotto's work at Assisi and Padua and was also impressed by the works of other Renaissance masters and by Classical art. On his return to France he exhibited the Triumph of the Martyr (1853; Luneville, Mus. Luneville; ) at the Salon of 1854. It depicted St Cecilia's body being carried to the catacombs, and its high finish, restrained colour and classical poses were to be constant features of his painting thereafter. All his works were executed in several stages involving an initial oil sketch followed by numerous pencil drawings taken from life. Though he generally restricted himself to classical, religious and genre subjects, he was commissioned by the state to paint Napoleon III Visiting the Flood Victims of Tarascon in 1856   Related Paintings of Adolphe William Bouguereau :. | The Lost Pleiad | The Young Shepherdess (mk26) | Work Interrupted (mk26) | Idyll:Family from Antiquity (nn04) | The Grape Picker |
Related Artists:
Braccesco, Carlo di
Italian, active 1478-1501
Grace Hudson
(1865 - 1937) was an American painter. She was nationally known during her lifetime for a numbered series of more than 684 portraits of the local Pomo Indians. She painted the first, "National Thorn", after her marriage in 1891, and the last in 1935. Grace Carpenter was born in Potter Valley, California. Her mother was one of the first white school teachers educating Pomo children and was a commercial portrait photographer in Ukiah, California; her father was a skilled panoramic and landscape photographer who chronicled early Mendocino County frontier enterprises such as logging, shipping and railroading. At fourteen years of age, Grace was sent to attend the recently-established San Francisco School of Design, an art school which emphasized painting from nature rather than from memory or by copying existing works. At sixteen, she executed an award-winning, full length, life sized self-portrait in crayon. While in San Francisco, she met and eloped with a man fifteen years her senior named William Davis, upsetting her parents and ending her formal studies. The marriage lasted only a year. From 1885 to 1890, Grace Carpenter Davis lived with her parents in Ukiah painting, teaching and rendering illustrations for magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Overland Monthly. Her work at that time had no particular focus and included genre, landscapes, portraits and still lifes in all media. Later in her career she would continue to accept occasional magazine illustration assignments including ones for Sunset.
Peter F Rothermel
1817-1895 Peter F Rothermel Gallery Rothermel was born in Nescopeck, Pennsylvania in 1817, although some date his birth earlier in 1813 or 1814. He studied under John R. Smith and Bass Otis before studying in various places in Europe. He specialized in portraits and dramatic historical paintings. He served as Vice President of the Artists' Fund Society in 1844 and as Director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1847 to 1855. His most famous paintings include Patrick Henry before the Virginia House of Burgesses (1851) and a massive oil painting of the Battle of Gettysburg that hangs in the State Museum of Pennsylvania. This latter work was commissioned by Gettysburg lawyer David McConaughy. Another of his more popular historical works is Columbus Before the Queen, painted in 1844.