The Assault

By 1898 the Impressionists had already changed what modern art looked like, and Bouguereau had spent decades on Salon juries resisting exactly that kind of painting. Yet his own polished pictures still outsold almost everyone else's, especially among American collectors who could not get enough of his flawless finish. He showed this canvas at the Salon that year: a young woman in white beset by a swarm of small winged cupids, one clinging to her leg, another settled in her lap, the rest pressing in from every side. The title turns it into a mock siege, love arriving as an ambush rather than a courtship. The painter Benjamin-Constant, seeing it, laughed that the poor girl was besieged and smitten, and admired the bold foreshortening of the little bodies.