Woman Knitting by Bouguereau Postcard

Untitled Painting (Woman Knitting) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1869, is an oil painting on canvas of a knitting woman seated on a fence post in a country landscape. The painting invokes popular subject matter of the 19th century such as realistic but sentimental portrayals of peasant scenes, workers in the field, and idealized female beauty. 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.