Costura

By 1898 Bouguereau was in his early seventies and the most decorated painter in France, showered with medals and official titles. In Paris the younger artists had long since moved past his smooth, polished manner, yet collectors, many of them American, still paid handsomely for it. He spent his late summers back near La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast, where he had grown up, and found his models among local families. The girl bent over her needle here is Yvonne, one of three sisters he painted again and again in those years. Her sewing, her plain dress, her lowered eyes are all worked to the same flawless, almost enamel-like finish he never gave up.