Whisperings of Love

Bouguereau finished this in early 1889, the year Paris opened the Exposition Universelle and unveiled the new Eiffel Tower, and the year a younger generation of painters was pushing rough brushwork and modern subjects. He kept doing the opposite. Here a young woman sits on a rock, a jar tucked under one arm, while a winged Cupid leans in to whisper at her ear. Every surface is smoothed to porcelain in the polished academic manner the Salon still prized. He first called it The Song of Love, then a dealer renamed it, and the museum in New Orleans knows it as Whisperings of Love. Who the model was has never been established. The whole picture turns on the small gesture of the child's mouth close to her ear.