A Onda

By 1896 William Bouguereau had spent decades as the most successful academic painter in France, and also as the artist the Impressionists loved to define themselves against. Now past 70, he sent The Wave to the Paris Salon that year and went on painting exactly as he always had, while a few streets away younger artists were pulling painting in the opposite direction. A young woman sits at the edge of the sea, the surf breaking white behind her, her skin rendered with the flawless, near-invisible brushwork the academy prized. She looks straight out at you. The model was Odile Charpentier, who sat for Bouguereau on many canvases in these years and had become one of his closest confidantes.