Die Gleichheit vor dem Tod

1848 was the year of revolutions across Europe, when crowds in Paris and a dozen other cities took to the streets demanding, among other things, equality. Bouguereau was 23, two years out of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and he chose that loaded word for his first major painting and his debut at the Salon. His equality, though, is not the one being fought over in the streets. He shows an angel of death drawing a white shroud over the body of a young man laid out on the ground, the whole scene stretched into a long, flat frieze. In his view we are made equal only in death, whatever we were in life. A note he wrote on a preparatory drawing puts it plainly, that a life will have meant nothing unless the person did some good on earth.