Virgin of Consolation

Bouguereau was known for smooth, pretty nymphs and Madonnas, which makes this one hard to sit with. A mother collapses in grief, her dead child slung lifeless across her lap, while the Virgin sits above them in dark blue and does not reach down to touch either one. He painted it in 1877, and the grief was his own. His young daughter had died years earlier, his teenage son Georges two years before this, and in the same year he finished the picture his wife Nelly also died. The Virgin here offers no easy comfort. She has seen this too many times, and can only look upward toward God on the child's behalf. The mother's upturned, hollowed-out face is the part people remember.