The night

In 1883 William-Adolphe Bouguereau was one of the most successful painters alive, the polished star of the official Salon in Paris, even as a younger crowd of Impressionists was starting to sell pictures his world dismissed as unfinished. He kept doing what he did superbly. Here he paints Night as a Greek goddess, Nyx, a nude figure drifting above a darkening coast with owls turning around her and her veil almost see-through. Everything is smooth, exact and frankly sensual, the academic manner at full strength. The picture crossed the Atlantic into American hands and eventually to the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, whose Washington estate, Hillwood, keeps it today.