Nymphe de l'océan

Bouguereau painted this Oceanid, a sea nymph from Greek myth, in 1904, when he was 79 and the most decorated academic painter in France. For half a century his smooth, faultless nudes had been exactly what the official Salon wanted, and he kept turning them out to the end. This one he showed at the Salon in 1905, the year he died. He was a son of La Rochelle, born on that Atlantic coast, and after his death his widow gave the picture to the town. A few months later, in the autumn of 1905, a group of young painters hung their raw, hot-coloured canvases at another Paris salon and were nicknamed the wild beasts, the Fauves.