Día de Todos los Difuntos

All Souls' Day falls on the second of November, and in France by the middle of the 19th century it had become a mass outing. Whole towns walked out to the new cemeteries beyond the walls carrying wreaths of immortelles, the dried yellow everlastings sold at the gates for exactly that purpose. Bouguereau laid those wreaths at the foot of the cross here and set a mother and daughter in mourning black beside it. He sent the picture to the Paris Salon in 1859, at 33 and a few years back from Rome, and the critics fastened on how contemporary the subject was for a painter of his training. The canvas is close to a metre and a half tall, and it hangs in Bordeaux, the city where he had his first drawing lessons.