William-Adolphe Bouguereau

William-Adolphe Bouguereau trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and won the Prix de Rome in 1850. He painted nymphs, mythologies and idealised peasant girls with flawless anatomy and a porcelain finish, and became the model Salon painter of his generation, honoured and highly paid in France and America. The Impressionists despised him, and his reputation collapsed after his death until a revival in the 1980s. In 1896 he married his former student, the American painter Elizabeth Jane Gardner.