William Adolphe Bouguereau French (1825-1905)
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				Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
		A Girl in Peasant Costume, Seated, Arms Folded, Holding a Ball of Wool and Knitting Needles in Her Right Hand, ca. 1875 Graphite on fine-textured cream paper 31.4 x 24.2 cm WA 1966.72.2

Many of Bouguereau’s fellow 19^th century artists felt that he epitomized all that was wrong with the French Academy; Degas and his friends used the term “Bouguereauté” to describe works that had similar characteristics that they scorned in Bouguereau’s work, and all forms of academic art: an adherence to classical ideals, artificiality both in subject and method, and a slickness of surface and painting technique.[i]  Bouguereau’s background in academic drawing began early on in his life, a style which permeated his work throughout his career.  Louis Sage, a student of Ingres, was William Adolphe Bouguereau’s drawing teacher from 1838-1841.  His family moved to Bordeaux in 1842, where his father allowed him to attend the École Municipale de Dessin et Peinture part time.  He left Bordeaux for Paris in 1846, and enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts.  In 1850, Bouguereau won the Prix de Rome, and remained there until 1854.  During his sojourn in Italy, he became extremely influenced by classical and late Renaissance works.

The École des Beaux-Arts was primarily a drawing school, and the quality of Bouguereau’s draftsmanship is evident in A Girl in Peasant Costume, Seated, Arms Folded, Holding a Ball of Wool and Knitting Needles in her Right Hand, ca. 1875.  His delicate use of line and subtle shading around the subject’s face as well as his attention to the various folds of drapery are in sharp contrast to the sketchiness with which he renders the wall on which she sits—it is clear where his priorities lie.  He uses highlights of white chalk on her chemise to show where the light would hit the brightest folds of fabric, further adding a dimension of modeling that could not be achieved solely in pencil.[ii]  He used the chalk as a way to remind himself later how he had envisioned rendering the fabric, when he did not have the model before him, indicating that though this work is signed like a finished drawing, it was meant to be a study for a later work.

Though his colleagues considered him to be a part of an older tradition which was being challenged by the ideals of the Impressionists, Bouguereau had a huge following among collectors, who saw his work portray a realm of eternal beauty distanced from contemporary life.  For Bouguereau, these drawings and paintings were about the idealization of forms—he would draw from life but remove all the imperfections.  Clients found Bouguereau’s work appealing because it did not remind them of the plight of the current-day peasant, as shown by other works in this show, such as those by Millet and Pissarro, which depict workers toiling in the fields.  Bouguereau’s peasants are distanced from the harsh reality of country life.  They are clean, well-fed, and well-clothed in costume that is impractical for working.  In the Ashmolean drawing, the subject is barefoot and her skirt is far too long for any practical use; her costume does not reflect what actual 19^th century peasants would have worn—instead this shows Bouguereau’s interest in classical works—the drapery in the girl’s dress is exquisitely rendered.[iii]  

A Girl in Peasant Costume, Seated, Arms Folded, Holding a Ball of Wool and Knitting Needles in her Right Hand is one of the few drawings from the French Academy in the Ashmolean collection and it is the study for a painting entitled La Petite Tricoteuse, executed in 1875.  In the leap from drawing study to painting, Bouguereau made a number of changes; the young woman is now in a landscape instead of sitting on a nondescript wall, but the most apparent change is in the expression and age of the model.  In the drawing, her expression seems petulant, while the face in the painting is softened significantly; she looks more timid and withdrawn than the figure in the drawing.  In addition to making the model look younger, he has made her more petite.  The slight muscle definition in her arm that is visible in the drawing disappears in the painted version.  In the drawing, her legs are disproportionately long in comparison to her body.  He has corrected this in the painting by scaling down her legs so that the figure is more petite and childlike.  It is likely that the drawing was from a real-life model, but in the thought process between the drawing and the painting, Bouguereau wanted to further idealize this figure— he takes the figure of a girl possibly in her early adolescence back into childhood—a time that was considered in the 19^th century, as well as today, as a time of uncomplicated innocence, that Bouguereau was striving to depict in all his works.