Bacchant

Bouguereau spent part of his teens in Bordeaux, working in the family wine trade and taking classes at the city's art school before he left for Paris and the Prix de Rome. When he painted this large bacchante in 1862 he was 37 and living off decorative commissions for the private houses of Second Empire Paris, where mythology was the accepted licence for a nude on this scale. A bacchante is a follower of Bacchus, the god of wine, and the crown of leaves and the pine-cone staff lying on the ground are her standard attributes. Two years later the Société des Amis des Arts de Bordeaux bought the picture, on 8 April 1864, and it has stayed in the city where he first learned to draw.