(from the collection of Dora Abramovna Lazurkina, associate of Vladimir Lenin). William-Adolphe Bouguereau ...

(from the collection of Dora Abramovna Lazurkina, associate of Vladimir Lenin). William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905). Lithograph from the 1890 painting "A Little Coaxing", 1900s, 61.5x43 cm, pasted on paper, two slight scratches in the upper part of the sheet on a mat, excellent preservation, lined on the back side of the stamp of the store that sold St. Petersburg.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905).

French painter, a prominent representative of the 19th century salon academism. His work can be characterized as "the quintessence of the painting of his generation." He worked mainly on mythological, allegorical and biblical subjects. Researchers classify his work as the so-called "romantic realism" because, following the techniques of romanticism, he preferred to paint from life and reproduced the appearance of his models with photographic accuracy. Despite his loyalty to academic principles, in particular, the primacy of drawing over color, in the 1890s he was influenced by symbolism, which he interpreted as a method of revealing the essence of the person being depicted with the help of secondary details carrying a semantic load.

Since 1876 - a full member of the Academy of Fine Arts, professor at the Higher School of Fine Arts (1888) and the Academy of Julian (1875). In 1857 he was awarded the Medal of Honor of the Salon, Commander of the Order of the Legion of Honor (1885). Taking advantage of commercial success, Bouguereau did not accept impressionism and new trends in the visual arts and consistently opposed them using administrative resources. As a result, after his death, he was forgotten, and for a long time only negative opinions about his work were reproduced in critical literature, he was perceived mainly as a painter of the nude genre, indulging the most base tastes. Only since the 1980s, when the attitude towards the salon-academic art changed, Bouguereau began to be considered as one of the greatest painters of the 19th century, who educated many famous artists, including Henri Matisse, Felix Vallotton, Wilhelm Liszt [de], and others.