William Adolphe Bouguereau

Born in the Atlantic port of La Rochelle on 30 November 1825, William-Adolphe Bouguereau was the son of wine and olive oil merchants. His first instruction in drawing and painting came from Louis Sage, a pupil of Ingres, and to fund his move to Paris he sold portraits, thirty-three oils inside three months.

He set his sights on the Prix de Rome and its three years at the Villa Medici, where he could study Raphael and the Renaissance masters and Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquity at first hand. His third attempt, in 1850, began with the rejected Dante and Virgil; five months later came word of a shared first prize, won with Shepherds Find Zenobia, and in January 1851 he arrived at the Villa Medici.

For his whole working life Bouguereau exhibited at the annual Paris Salon, the showcase whose crowds ran above three hundred thousand visitors. His finish was flawless and his subjects were what the academy wanted, and the honours followed: life membership of the Society of French Artists in 1876, the Grand Medal of Honour in 1885, the Commander's and finally the Grand Officer's cross of the Legion of Honour.

From the 1860s he taught drawing at the Académie Julian as well, giving lessons and advice to students, men and women alike, from around the world.

The idealized world of these canvases gave living form to goddesses, nymphs, bathers, shepherdesses and madonnas that the wealthy collectors of the day loved to buy. Behind the sheen stood real reverence: among the old masters he particularly loved Greek sculpture, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Rubens and Delacroix.

Later taste was unkind. Critics held the smoothed-out forms and waxen surfaces against him and the modern movements took the stage, but the public never quite let him go, and his craftsmanship, whatever one makes of the subjects, was never in dispute. He died in La Rochelle on 19 August 1905, at seventy-nine, of heart disease.