William-Adolphe Bouguereau

High-resolution, custom printed fine art prints, posters, cards, gifts and reproductions from the art of William-Adolphe Bouguereau. William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825 - 1905) was a wildly popular, 19th century 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 artists 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 finely drawn, classical contours, in subjects that were often sentimental. Bouguereau's reputation diminished greatly in the 20th century with the rise of Impressionism and Modern art, but interest in his traditional figurative paintings has surged again in recent years.