Bouguereau's Battle

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, USA, has acquired this early work by William-Adolphe Bouguereau: The Battle between the Centaurs and Lapiths (1852). Such is the Anti-art Establishment's mindless rejection of academic paintings that the curator and director at the VMFA both feel the need to justify buying this masterpiece (title link). Ignorant art pundits have popularized the misguided view that Bouguereau was merely a French Victorian genre painter. Okay, he painted lots of cute little girls with flowers in their hair, because an artist must make a living and that's what his public wanted; but don't tell me he wasn't a brilliant artist. He captured subtle skin tones better than any artist before or since, and this powerful battle scene holds its own in a lineage of dramatic works that stems from Uccello and Leonardo da Vinci, passes through Caravaggio and Rubens to Boris Vallejo in the present day. This is Art. To view a larger graphic CLICK.