Nymphen und Satyr

Bouguereau showed this at the Paris Salon in the spring of 1873, a year before a small group of painters we now call the Impressionists held their first show and were laughed at. He was on the winning side of that divide, the polished academic style everyone admired, and this large canvas of four nymphs pulling a reluctant satyr toward the water was exactly what the public loved. An American collector bought it almost at once and took it across the Atlantic. From there its story gets stranger than the mythology it shows. By 1888 it was hanging over the bar of the Hoffman House hotel in New York, a famous drinking spot where the painting became an attraction in its own right, reflected in mirrors behind the bottles. Then around 1901 a new owner decided the nude figures were improper and had it rolled up and locked away in storage. It stayed hidden for about 40 years. In 1942 the collector Robert Sterling Clark tracked it down and bought it, and it hangs here at his museum in the Berkshires, its smooth surfaces looking exactly as they did the day it left the Salon.