Youth and Love

Bouguereau showed this at the Paris Salon of 1877, and it went on to the World's Fair the following year. The collector Laure Acloque owned it until her death in 1890 and left it to the Musée du Luxembourg, the state's museum for living artists, so it entered the national collection while the painter was still working. In 1986, the year the Musée d'Orsay opened, it was sent on long-term loan to the château of Lunéville in Lorraine. In January 2003 a fire that started in the château's chapel destroyed much of the museum there, including an early Bouguereau of Saint Cecilia lent there by the state in 1924. This canvas was spared. It came back to the Orsay in 2012, and the signature and date are still there at the lower left, below the stream the young woman steps across with Cupid riding on her shoulders.