Sleep

Bouguereau sent this to the Paris Salon of 1864 together with a bather, and the pair announced a change of direction. He had made his name in history painting, the grandest and best paid category in the French system, and here he gave the same large scale to a Roman peasant woman in a courtyard. She holds a naked child between her knees and raises a finger to her lips, signalling to an older boy carrying cherries in the fold of his shirt not to wake his sleeping brother. Critics of 1864 saw at once what the grouping resembled, a Holy Family in working clothes. The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who a decade later would stake his business on the Impressionists, took the picture straight from the artist and pressed him to paint more mothers and children, which Bouguereau did for the next 40 years. It went back on public view at the Paris world's fair of 1867.