The Virgin With Angels

Bouguereau painted this enormous altarpiece in 1900, when he was in his mid-70s and among the most honoured painters in France, and when the kind of polished, idealised art he stood for was being pushed aside by the Impressionists and everything that came after them. He turned, deliberately, to the deep past. The Virgin sits before a throne inlaid with coloured stones in a Byzantine manner, crowned with stars, the sleeping child against her, ringed by some twenty angels in a great almond-shaped halo. Two of them kneel in front swinging censers of incense. It was among the last large paintings of his life. Bouguereau died in 1905, at 79, back in La Rochelle, the coastal town where he had been born.