La Vergine dei Gigli

Bouguereau painted this Madonna in 1899, when he was in his mid-seventies and near the end of a career that had made him one of the most successful painters alive. Mary sits upright holding the Christ child, whose arms are spread as if already blessing the world, and the white lilies around them carry their old meaning of her purity. Everything is finished to a smooth, almost porcelain surface, the manner Bouguereau had practised for half a century. By the last year of the century that manner had gone out of fashion among the avant-garde and the critics who backed it. His buyers had not gone anywhere. The pose reuses one he had worked out in earlier Madonnas, a composition he clearly trusted.