La Vierge aux roses

Bouguereau painted this Madonna in 1903, when he was 78 and had two years left to live. By then grief was the steady fact of his life. He had buried his first wife and four of his five children. The last of them, his son Paul, had died of tuberculosis in 1900. He went on painting the same serene, softly finished holy figures the salons had loved for decades, seemingly untouched by everything the newer painters in Paris were up to. The Virgin sits with the child against a bank of red and pink roses, the old flower of Mary. The picture now hangs in a Gothic-revival mansion above the Hudson at Tarrytown in New York, far from the France it was made in.