Габриэль Кот

In 1890 the aging academic master Bouguereau began what he meant to be a study, and could not stop. His sitter was Gabrielle Cot, daughter of his own most gifted pupil, the painter Pierre-Auguste Cot. Taken with her, Bouguereau turned the study into a finished portrait, the only painting in his long career he made for no commission and no client, purely because he wanted to. It is small, barely larger than a sheet of paper, and every bit of his polished surface goes into her face and her steady, faintly amused gaze. He gave it to her family as a wedding present that same year. It stayed with her descendants until 1998, when it surfaced at auction in New York. Since 2022 it has been on deposit at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, a French society portrait now living far from Paris.