Spring songs

Bouguereau finished this in 1889, the year Paris threw open its great World's Fair and raised the Eiffel Tower, and the year a younger generation of painters was busy tearing up the polished surfaces he stood for. None of that argument shows here. A young woman sits in a spring meadow while small winged cupids climb over her shoulder and sing into her ear, one of them tugging at her almost in play. Every petal and strand of hair is worked to a smooth, exact finish, the manner that made Bouguereau the most sought-after academic painter of his day and the one the modernists most wanted to overthrow. He kept painting this world of gods and idylls to the end, untroubled by the noise outside the studio.