Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
French; 19th-century
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum (Exhibition: Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism)
23%
Girl Eating Porridge. 1874. Oil on canvas
Bouguereau is especially terrible when he dips his toes — but it's never any more than a dip — into the water of painting gratia painting. He does so here on the broad side of the leg of the stool and in the girl's blue ribbon and on the floor and the walls of this room. He drags his brush and dabs his colors just enough to remind you that, yes, this is a painting, but not enough to actually introduce any sort of rupture to the depiction. The slight, safe torque of the girl's body stays perfectly intact, as does the cute blush on her cheeks. (The red there is brought out, in fact, by that clunky blue band that wraps around her head.) The shading on her face presents no challenge, the wrinkles in her shirtsleeve are lifeless. She is so primly enframed by the hallway behind her. There is something too corporeal about her hand. This is a realism that refuses to challenge itself, that fails ever to invert and become unreal or too real. (TFS, 2026)