春之梦

By 1901 the art that excited Paris was moving fast away from William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Impressionism had already won its argument, and younger painters were pushing further still, while he went on making the smooth, flawless mythologies that had made him rich and famous decades earlier. He was 76 when he painted this dream of spring, a young woman seated in a wood as small winged cupids crown her with flowers, the season imagined as a goddess. His finish is deliberately seamless, the brushwork hidden so the skin looks like polished stone. He kept working in exactly this manner until his death in 1905, four years later.