Estimated Price:

   £   

Realised Price:

   £   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

signed W.Bouguereau (lower left)

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Goupil & Cie. (acquired directly from the artist, 1881)
Private Collection (acquired from Goupil, Boussod, et Valadon, 1887)
(thence by descent)
EXHIBITED

London, French Gallery, Winter Exhibition, 1885/1886
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

The artist's account ledger book, 1881
Charles Vendryès, Dictionnaire Illustré des Beaux-Arts: Bouguereau, Paris: éditions Ludovic Baschet, 1885, under the title réduction de la Vierge aux anges, p. 62
Marius Vachon, W. Bouguereau, Paris, 1900, p. 154
Mark Steven Walker, A Summary Catalogue of the Paintings in William Adolphe Bouguereau: L'art Pompier, Borghi & Co., Paris, 1991, p. 71
CATALOGUE NOTE

The daunting challenge to meaningfully portray the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child has endured throughout the history of Western art. Certainly, Bouguereau had a multitude of sources from which to work. Accordingly, he depicted the Virgin and Child in a number of variations. With a Song of the Angels, the clasped hands of the Virgin, her head lowered in sleep, and the Christ Child resting against her breast, Bouguereau captures the tender connection between a woman and her child. By placing the figures in a sylvan setting of indiscriminate time and place, he allows the viewer to quietly observe the scene, without disturbing the pair, who sleep as a sisterly triad of angels play a sweet song.

The gentle, comforting calm of the composition is undeniable and would certainly have been an important element to the late nineteenth-century viewer. By the time Bouguereau began his preparations for the Song of the Angels, France was emerging from decades of great social change. Revolutions had replaced kings with presidents, farms transformed into factories and the demands of modern business threatened the time parents spent with family. So demanding were the requirements of "modern" life that Pope Leo XIII, the great statesman and philosopher elected in 1878, advocated for the preservation of the French home, often invoking the Virgin Mary's loving motherhood and gentle female powers as an example and inspiration. It is fitting, then, that Song of the Angels quietly communicates the importance of family connection. As the Virgin rests against a tree, the casualness of her pose suggests an unworried peacefulness, further emphasized by the sweeping folds of her simple blue gown (the color that has long symbolized her purity) and dropping bare foot. The artlessness of the Christ Child further imports the safety and serenity of the scene, as the angels play the hand organ, lute, and violin, the musical instruements of country musicians.

The composition's smooth brushwork erases the presence of the painter, and creates a balance between immobile, static form and rich surface details, textures, and color. The strength of line and drawing allow for a softness of color and supple texture. These combinations gently guide the eye throughout the composition, giving focus to the figures in a realm of visual pleasure. As such, the composition combines the real and the theological, connected yet apart from the daily life of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Song of Angels is an extraordinary subject, presenting sublime, transcendent beauty in an idealistic setting where ugliness, poverty and pessimism cannot exist. Somewhat fanciful elements are balanced by real-world reminders of family, home and Church. As Bouguereau said "in spite of all that is written to the contrary, an artist only reproduces what he finds in nature---to know how to see and how to seize what one sees---there is all the secret of the imagination." (as quoted in Fronia A. Wissman, Bouguereau, San Francsico, 1996, p 64).

The powerful nature of this "secret" is evident in the unique history of the work with the artist and his audience. In March of 1881, Bouguereau had completed the original Song of the Angels (now at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California), offering it for the enormous sum of 50,0000 francs through the dealer William Schauss of New York. Further, the artist selected this monumental work as one of only two entries in the Salon of 1881 (as no. 265) as well as his only submission to the Exposition universelle of 1889 (as no. 163). The period between these two events found Bouguereau at the pinnacle of his career, and he was invited to sign an exclusive contract with the famous French art dealership Goupil, succeeded in 1875 by the firm of Boussod & Valadon. Bougureau's most important masterworks would be displayed in the galleries, where clients could place orders for replicas. Though highly profitable, Bougureau found the process of copying his work somewhat monotonous and largely left its responsibility to his studio. As such, it is highly unusual that he chose to work alone in the reduction of Song of the Angels. Indeed, the finished work, submitted to his gallery on August 5, 1881, presents a perfect encapsulation of the original. So happy was the artist with the work that, as he explained to his daughter Henriette, he chose to exhibit it, rather than the original, in London at French Gallery's winter exhibition of 1884/1885.

Bougureau left a record with his gallery that "la reduction de la Vierge aux anges est execute entièreement de ma main" (the reduction of Song of the Angels is done entirely by my hand). Clearly, the artist, his gallery, and the collector considered this work an ideal embodiment of the merit of familial values, a subject that was so personally important that its reproduction could not be left to anyone but the originator. As such, Song of Angels stands as the perfect evocation of artistic talent, spiritual inspiration, and earthly peace, a song that plays on and on.

We would like to thank Damien Bartoli for kindly providing additional information for this catalogue note (translated from the French). This painting will be included in the forthcoming Bouguereau catalogue raisonné being prepared by Damien Bartoli with the assistance of Fred Ross, the Bouguereau Committee, and the Art Renewal Center, www.artrenewal.org.