Innocence

William-Adolphe Bouguereau 1825 - 1905

Summary

This portrait of a young peasant girl knitting typifies a genre at which Bouguereau excelled, and which brought him great critical and commercial success in his lifetime. The child leans against a stone trough, looking directly at the viewer. A narrow strip of knitting, perhaps the beginnings of a woollen stocking, trails from a set of fine needles. The trough has no ornament but a sparse flowering plant grows at its base. The picture conveys notions of simplicity and naivety. Bouguereau studied in his native town of La Rochelle, before entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in 1846. His success in winning the coveted Prix de Rome, the Salon's most prestigious prize, for his history painting in 1850, meant that he spent four fully funded years in Italy. There he honed his talent for painting genre subjects, especially local peasants, as well as training for the ambitious religious and mythological subjects that brought him acclaim at the Paris Salon. A prolific painter and energetic teacher, he is said to have tutored more than two hundred American art students at his Paris studio. One of the most popular academic painters of this time, he exhibited at nearly every Salon from 1854 until his death. The polished execution and the visual isolation of this quiet domestic subject give no hint of the harsh realities of peasant life in 19th-century France.