4.9/5
Fifteen Putti, Two Centaurs, and a Woman Who Will Not Look at You
Venus stands on a scallop shell, drawn through the water by a dolphin. [1] Her weight rests on one leg and her body bends into a long S, the pose academic painters called contrapposto. Brown hair falls to her thighs and she lifts both arms to gather it, which is what keeps her face turned away from whoever is looking. [1]
Count the children and there are fifteen, Cupid and Psyche among them. [1] They fill the sky in loose knots. Below the waterline, nymphs and centaurs watch her arrive, and two of the centaurs raise conch and Triton shells to blow. [1] The noise is the only thing in the picture that is not still.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau left himself in it. High in the clouds on the left there is a shadow with a head, a shoulder, an arm and a raised fist. [1] It is easy to miss and impossible to unsee.
A Figure Borrowed From His Own Nymphs, and a Shell Borrowed From Botticelli
The composition answers two pictures at once: the birth of Venus as earlier painters staged it, from Botticelli's shell to Raphael's Triumph of Galatea. [1] Bouguereau kept the shell and the crowd and threw out the wind gods.
Venus herself is not new either. She was enlarged from a nymph in The Nymphaeum, painted the year before. [1] The same close finish and the same cool light run through Nymphs and Satyr, and through the rest of the Bouguereau paintings we reproduce.
The canvas was signed and dated in 1879 and shown that year at the Salon. [2] The French state bought it from the artist the same year for the Musée du Luxembourg. [2] It hung there until 1920, spent nearly sixty years on deposit at the museum in Nantes, and came to the Musée d'Orsay in 1979. [2]
Choosing a Size for a Standing Figure on a Vertical Wall
Our painters copy this picture by hand, in oil, on museum-grade linen canvas. The format is upright and the figure stands almost the full height of it, so the painting wants a tall stretch of wall rather than a wide one — above a console table, or in the narrow space beside a doorway. Prices start at $350.
Seven sizes are listed on this page. The smallest keeps the crowd readable at arm's length; the largest brings the figure close to life size, which is the scale the original was painted for. If none of them fits the wall you have in mind, the painting can be made to a size you give us, including the proportion of the original. It is one of the hundred most famous paintings we paint to order.
