The Wave by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

The Wave by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1896, is an oil painting on canvas of a female figure reclining on the beach. Like a modern day Venus rising from the waves, Bouguereau’s pneumatic, classical subject turns her head and smiles at the viewer as a large ocean wave breaks at her side. The polished, traditional technique of academic realism creates an image that is coy and sentimental yet strangely interesting more than a century after this style of painting fell out of fashion. William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825 - 1905) was a French painter who trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and the Villa Medici in Rome. He exhibited with great success in the French Salon and became one of most renowned and wealthy artists of his era. Bouguereau worked in the French Academic tradition, a school of late 19th century modern painters who concentrated on the human figure and classical subjects in highly polished works of optical realism. His main interest was the female figure, usually rendered in quasi-classical, finely drawn contours, in subjects that were often sentimental. Bouguereau's reputation diminished greatly in the 20th century with the rise of Modernism, but interest in his traditional figurative paintings has surged again in recent years.