Fraternal Love

Bouguereau painted this in Rome in 1851, a few months after he had moved into the Villa Medici, the seat of the French Academy, as a state-funded student. In Rome the obvious teacher was Raphael, and the group here borrows the arrangement of Raphael's pictures of the Virgin with the Christ Child and the young John the Baptist, a mother holding the smaller child while an older boy reaches up to kiss his cheek. Bouguereau kept the arrangement and gave the picture a title that names no saints at all, Fraternal Love. A few years later he sold it to the London dealer Ernest Gambart, and it passed through the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel before reaching the Boston merchant and collector Thomas Wigglesworth. His estate gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1908.