The toilette of Venus

Painted in 1873 and held at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, this mythological work by Bouguereau depicts the goddess of love at her toilette—a subject with a distinguished history from Raphael and Titian through Boucher and into the nineteenth-century Salon. Bouguereau treats the mythological subject as an occasion for the display of the female nude at its most idealized, the bathroom and mirror as contexts that make nudity acceptable and even decorous. His Venus is not the sensual, earthly goddess of Venetian painting but the spiritualized ideal of academic tradition.

Bouguereau renders Venus's nude form with his characteristic seamless technique, the skin surface modeled through infinitely subtle tone gradations to achieve a porcelain-smooth perfection. The surrounding attendants—putti, drapery, water—are painted with equal technical accomplishment, the composition organized around the central nude in the manner of Renaissance Venus paintings he directly references.