Madonna with child and John the Baptist

In the spring of 1875 this canvas hung at the Paris Salon, the official annual exhibition, and it earned one of Émile Zola's sharpest lines. Zola was then sending monthly letters on Paris life to a Saint Petersburg journal, the Messenger of Europe, and in his June report on the Salon he called Bouguereau's Virgin with the Christ Child and Saint John characteristic of his style in every respect. He said he had left it out of his pages on religious painting because it belonged in a boudoir rather than a church. The picture is about two metres tall. The Virgin sits on a marble throne under a gold halo, and in front of her the Christ Child and the young John the Baptist, dressed in his sheepskin, hold each other and kiss. It is now in a private collection. Three years after the Salon it went on show again at the Exposition Universelle of 1878, as one of the 12 canvases Bouguereau exhibited there.