La danza

This is decoration in the grand old sense. In 1855 a wealthy Genevan banker, Anatole Bartholoni, hired the young Bouguereau to paint a set of canvases for a drawing room in his Paris mansion, and this long allegory of dance was made to run along a wall as part of that scheme. At nearly four meters wide it gives him room for a chain of figures in classical dress, moving in a rhythm that reads from one end to the other. Bouguereau was in his early thirties and building the polished academic manner that would make him one of the most admired and best-paid painters in France, just as a younger generation of Impressionists was starting to reject everything he stood for. He showed the work at the Salon of 1857. It only reached the Musée d'Orsay in 1981, given to the French state by a private donor.