Love's Resistance by Bouguereau

Love's Resistance by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1885, is a polished academic drawing in black crayon with white gouache watercolor of a young woman seated in a romantic landscape pushing away the winged Cupid. The drawing is a study for or after Bouguereau’s large painting Young Woman Resisting Eros. Here the delicate, nuanced drawing and clean outlines of the French academic style are used for the greatest graphic effect. 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.