After the bath

In 1875 William Bouguereau was about as successful as a living painter could be. He sat on the Paris Salon juries and shipped smooth, faultlessly finished canvases like this bather to collectors across Europe and America, who paid large sums for them. Every surface here, the skin, the hair, the far-off sky, is worked until the brushwork disappears entirely. The date is worth holding onto, because just the spring before, a small breakaway group that included Monet and Renoir had hung their loose, unfinished-looking pictures in a photographer's old studio and been mocked by the critics, the very first Impressionist show. For the moment, Bouguereau's kind of painting was still the one the establishment and the market wanted. Within a few decades his name would drop almost entirely out of the histories those younger men came to fill.