William-Adolphe Bouguereau (November 30, 1825 – August 19, 1905) was a French academic painter. William Bouguereau was a traditionalist; in his realistic genre paintings he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of Classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau was born in La Rochelle,
France on November 30, 1825, into a family of wine and olive oil
merchants. He seemed destined to join the family business but for the
intervention of his uncle Eugène, a Roman Catholic priest,
who taught him classical and Biblical subjects, and arranged for
Bouguereau to go to high school. He showed artistic talent early on. His
father was convinced by a client to send him to the École des
Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, where he won first prize in figure painting for a depiction of Saint Roch. To earn extra money, he designed labels for jams and preserves.
Through his uncle, Bouguereau was given a commission to paint portraits
of parishioners, and when his aunt matched the sum he earned, Bouguereau
went to Paris and became a student at the École des Beaux-Arts.
To supplement his formal training in drawing, he attended anatomical
dissections and studied historical costumes and archeology. He was
admitted to the studio of François-Edouard Picot, where he studied painting in the academic style
Academic painting placed the highest status on historical and mythological subjects and Bouguereau won the coveted Prix de Rome in 1850, with his Zenobia Found by Shepherds on the Banks of the Araxes. His reward was a year at the Villa Medici
in Rome, Italy, where in addition to formal lessons he was able to
study first-hand the Renaissance artists and their masterpieces, as well
as Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities. He also studied classical literature, which influenced his subject choice for the rest of career
