Bouguereau, William-Adolphe (1825-1905)
Le jour des morts (All Saints’ Day)
1859
Oil on canvas, 147 x 120 cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux
William Bouguereau presented at the Salon of 1859 Wounded Love, The Portrait of Madame Duret, painted in 1857, as well as The Day of the Dead. E. de Lépinois discovering the works reports these words: “Mr. Bouguereau likes opposites: we have from him this year, Wounded Love and Day of the Dead, the two poles of life. The beauty, the youth, the carefreeness of spring, so much charm and freshness changed into sobs and poignant sadness. […] This is realism that I understand and that touches me. »
Day of the Dead depicts a mother and daughter mourning the loss of a husband and father at the foot of a burial cross. The artist uses the lexical field of death with black, crowns of immortelles, the cross, winter. Critics of the time praised “the modernity of the subject” (Mathilde Stevens), translated by a realistic expression of pain and its humanity (Maxime Ducamp).
Théophile Gautier evokes the work in laudatory terms: “A widow, still beautiful, is kneeling in front of a tomb, she raises her eyes to the sky, as if to search for the soul whose remains lie beneath the earth, a long gaze resigned, while his young daughter hides in her maternal womb a face drowned in tears; we don’t see them, these tears, but we can guess them; the shoulders cry, the side sobs, and the pain convulsively lifts this young body under the dark livery of mourning. What a beautiful group to place on a grave, we would make this painting sculpted in marble! In a work of pure feeling like this, we readily forget the technical details. However, we will point out with what art these black fabrics are treated which absorb light and are so difficult to model. These sad dresses have all the nobility of antique draperies. »
An academic painter, the artist received a solid artistic education which made large, skillfully ordered compositions familiar to him. He studied ancient sculpture, Byzantine mosaics and Giotto‘s frescoes in Rome. He understood the classical masters of the Italian Renaissance, copied them and then imitated them very widely with the certainty of maintaining tradition. He meditated before Greek statuary and before the works of Raphael and his idealism. The artist copied works by the great master in Rome in 1852; and he observed and faithfully imitated the archaisms and mannerisms of the drawing without attempting to give the characters a more natural appearance.
To serve this desire for ideals, he adopts a style drawing on tradition and the search for colorful harmony and poetry. Théophile Gautier also noted that “The crowns of immortelles, whose funereal yellow clashes so cruelly with the eyes, have lost their inseparable and garish nuance under the brush of Mr. Bouguereau”.
Thoughtful and methodical, Bouguereau multiplies drawings, analyzes of details, studies of draperies and research into composition. This process gives him confidence in his hand and allows him to let his inspiration flow. The artist also works on several works at the same time.
The position of the mother is identical to that of a woman represented with her two children in another painting entitled Brotherly Love and dating from 1854.
Here, he simply seeks to express, with the specific means of his technique, subjects of universal sensitivity. Glazes are limited to dark areas such as backgrounds and draperies; on the other hand, flesh tones are well defined and their translucent appearance is obtained by very studied modeling and precise rendering of values and tones.
Part of his work is marked by sweet imagery and his skillful art in delicate, porcelain colors appealed to a wide audience. But some wanted to see in this perfect technique only too skilful play with the brush.
The painter renewed this theme of death in 1877, after the death of his wife Nelly (April 3, 1877 at the age of forty), then that of his fifth child. He will paint his moving Consoling Virgin in their memory.
In his works, Bouguereau, with his ability to make dreams and reality coincide, expresses the values that are dear to him: classical culture, family happiness, hope in life, Christian faith. (MusBA)