Most Reverend Léon-Benoît-Charles Thomas

1875

Teaching at the Académie Julian

From 1875 Bouguereau teaches drawing at the private Académie Julian, a co-educational school independent of the École des Beaux-Arts, with no entrance exams and nominal fees; over several decades hundreds, if not thousands, of students from around the world pass through his classes, among them Henri Matisse, Otto Fries, Émilie Desjeux, Paul Chabas and Pierre Auguste Cot. A conflict between Bouguereau and Matisse is known: the teacher advised him not only to study perspective more carefully but generally to learn to hold a pencil.

19 June 1875

The death of his eldest son Georges

At fifteen Georges’s health suffers and his mother takes him away from the bad air of Paris, but he dies on 19 June 1875, aged sixteen. For Bouguereau it is the start of a series of losses: in the next few years he will lose his wife and his youngest son as well.

1877

Elizabeth Gardner and the oath to his mother

Soon after Nelly’s death his mother makes Bouguereau swear that he will not remarry in her lifetime. He plans to marry his pupil Elizabeth Jane Gardner (they meet in December 1877), but his mother and eldest daughter oppose the marriage. Some accounts say the couple marry secretly in May 1879 and announce the marriage only in 1896; others, that they marry in Paris in June 1896 after a nineteen-year engagement.

3 April 1877

The death of his wife Nelly; in June, of the baby Maurice

In October 1876 Nelly has a fifth child, Maurice, but her health declines and the doctors suspect tuberculosis (other accounts say she dies of complications after childbirth); on 3 April 1877 Bouguereau’s wife dies, aged forty. Two months later, in June, the baby Maurice dies too.

1878

The Paris Universal Exhibition: twelve paintings

For the opening of the Paris Universal Exhibition in May 1878, showcasing French work, Bouguereau finds and borrows twelve of his paintings from their owners, including his new work “Nymphaeum”.

1879

“The Birth of Venus”: rivalry with Cabanel

In 1879 Bouguereau starts on the large canvas “The Birth of Venus” — possibly out of rivalry with Cabanel, whose picture had long been regarded as the standard of academic painting. Critics receive the work coolly: Huysmans writes that Bouguereau “invented aerated painting”; yet it begins a consistent series of nudes — about ten percent of all the artist’s paintings.