Мокрый Купидон

By 1891, when Bouguereau painted this winged Cupid fresh from the water, his kind of picture had become the thing younger painters defined themselves against. The French title, L'Amour mouille, simply means the wet love. He was then among the most decorated artists in France, a fixture of the official Salon and its academies, and a dependable seller of exactly this sort of smooth mythological nude, finished so cleanly the brushwork all but vanishes. In the same Paris, Monet and his circle were already a decade into pulling that polish apart. Bouguereau paid it little mind and went on painting Cupids and nymphs, keeping a busy studio at these subjects almost until his death in 1905.