Blessures d'amour

Blessures d'amour (Wounds of Love), dated 1897, addresses the theme of love's inevitable pains through a figure whose emotional state — whether shown through tears, a gesture of grief, or a simply bowed head — makes visible the interior damage of romantic feeling. The subject had extensive precedents in French allegorical and sentimental genre painting, from eighteenth-century Rococo caprice subjects to mid-nineteenth-century Salon pictures of disappointed lovers. By 1897, Bouguereau was seventy-two years old and still producing paintings of considerable emotional refinement, his late career characterized by a concentration of technical means in service of intensified emotional expression. The wounded or sorrowful female figure — not grotesquely suffering but quietly hurt — occupied an important place in the late Victorian and Third Republic aesthetic of refined emotional legibility.

The wounds of love subject required Bouguereau to render sorrow through the most subtle physiognomic means: a slight redness around the eyes, a particular set of the lips, a tension in the brow that is unmistakably grief without being dramatically contorted. His mature glazing technique was ideally suited to these fine-grained emotional distinctions.