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Lot Essay
In La Vierge à l'agneau, Bouguereau revised the popular Renaissance subject of the Virgin and Child accompanied by the sacrificial lamb. By adopting the tondo format for the painting, only the second of his career but common in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italian art, Bouguereau may have intended to make his inspiration from the Renaissance masters explicit. Leonardo da Vinci's famous rendering of the scene, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and a Lamb (Musée du Louvre), may have been a specific influence as both paintings share a distinct pyramidal composition as well as an emphasis on the playful, human qualities of their figures.
Throughout his life, Bouguereau tried his brush at various religious themes. While these paintings tell specific Christian stories, they are universal in their appeal to human emotions. In the present painting, the Virgin is depicted with humility as she sits on the ground holding her golden-haired son. The innocent child clings to his mother with his left hand while extending with his right a sprig of clover to the downy lamb. While the lamb alludes to Christ's ultimate sacrifice and to the specific declaration by John the Baptist in the Gospel of John, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29), the painting speaks more to the profound depth of parental love. Mary appears foremost as a mother, gazing adoringly at her cherubic son, and only secondarily as the Holy Virgin. Indeed, she shares many similarities with Bouguereau's renderings of the peasant women from La Rochelle, his bucolic coastal retreat from Paris, and is in fact the same model as appears in L'attente, depicting a young shepherdess pausing in a pastoral landscape.
With its breathtaking precision and poignant subject, La Vierge à l'agneau is a consummate example of the artist's signature work, which led to Bouguereau's popular and critical acclaim during his lifetime. Among the prestigious awards bestowed upon Bouguereau was the Légion d'honneur, which he received in 1903, the same year that he completed the present painting. Perhaps the highest praise for the Academic master, however, came from the writer Adrien Désamy, who professed in the arts journal L'art Contemporain in May 1879, 'It is said that no one is better versed than Victor Hugo to speak of women and children, one can similarly exclaim, that in our times, no one is more skilled to paint women and children like M. Bouguereau.'
Throughout his life, Bouguereau tried his brush at various religious themes. While these paintings tell specific Christian stories, they are universal in their appeal to human emotions. In the present painting, the Virgin is depicted with humility as she sits on the ground holding her golden-haired son. The innocent child clings to his mother with his left hand while extending with his right a sprig of clover to the downy lamb. While the lamb alludes to Christ's ultimate sacrifice and to the specific declaration by John the Baptist in the Gospel of John, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29), the painting speaks more to the profound depth of parental love. Mary appears foremost as a mother, gazing adoringly at her cherubic son, and only secondarily as the Holy Virgin. Indeed, she shares many similarities with Bouguereau's renderings of the peasant women from La Rochelle, his bucolic coastal retreat from Paris, and is in fact the same model as appears in L'attente, depicting a young shepherdess pausing in a pastoral landscape.
With its breathtaking precision and poignant subject, La Vierge à l'agneau is a consummate example of the artist's signature work, which led to Bouguereau's popular and critical acclaim during his lifetime. Among the prestigious awards bestowed upon Bouguereau was the Légion d'honneur, which he received in 1903, the same year that he completed the present painting. Perhaps the highest praise for the Academic master, however, came from the writer Adrien Désamy, who professed in the arts journal L'art Contemporain in May 1879, 'It is said that no one is better versed than Victor Hugo to speak of women and children, one can similarly exclaim, that in our times, no one is more skilled to paint women and children like M. Bouguereau.'