The Prize Book

The red book in the girl's lap is a livre de prix, a school prize. French children were handed these at the end-of-year prize-giving, bound in red with gilt lettering and filled with adventure stories and improving essays, and the ceremony mattered to a republic that had made primary school free in 1881 and compulsory and secular the year after. Bouguereau was 76 when he painted it in 1901, working for a market that had largely moved across the Atlantic. In December of that year the canvas went to Daniel Reid, an Indiana industrialist known as the Tin Plate King, who had just sold his mills into J. P. Morgan's new steel combine. Apart from the dark chair and that scarlet cover, almost everything in the picture is a shade of warm white.