Charity

At the Paris Salon of 1865 the painting everyone argued about was Manet's Olympia. Bouguereau sent this, and nobody had any trouble reading it. A barefoot mother sits with three children on the lower steps of the Madeleine, the temple-fronted church at the centre of the wealthy new Paris that Haussmann was then cutting out of the old city.

The subject was an old one. Charity had been painted for centuries as a mother surrounded by children, the one who gives. Bouguereau kept the pyramid of figures and the steady gaze out at the viewer that belong to altarpiece painting, and made the woman the one in need of it. The church behind her was young in 1865, consecrated only in 1842 after decades of building and several changes of plan, including a spell designated as a temple to Napoleon's armies.