1825-1905
Academic Classical painter, teacher, frescoist and draftsman
Jeunes Bohemiennes
Young Gypsies
166 x 99 cms | 65 1/4 x 38 3/4 ins
Oil on canvas
Collection of Fred and Sherry Ross
| United States
-- by Kara Ross
"Modernist ideologues love to say that Bouguereau was irrelevant to his times because he wasn't one of the impressionists who were carving out the path to abstract expressionism. Nothing could be further from the truth. A child of the recent French and American Revolution, Bouguereau along with many artists and writers of the day, believed in the breakthroughs of Enlightenment thought: Democracy, the Rights of men, "Libertè, Egalitè, Fraternitè". Not only wasn't it true that he was irrelevant, but nothing could have been more relevant, than works like this that ennobled and elevated ordinary people and peasants. And what better way then to take the lowest of the low in society, the Gypsies, and to raise them to the heavens? They are both beautiful without being overly pretty; 'real' and 'ideal' at the same time."
-- by Fred Ross