Orestes1.0108_Bouguereau

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1825-1905, "Les Remords d'Oreste" or "Orestes Pursued by the Furies," 1862, oil on canvas, Chrylser Collection, Norfolk, Virginia, no. 71.623.

Compare this to the Mei's earlier Orestes and Rahl's contemporary Orestes. Downman's chorus-full of frighteningly ugly Furies (cf. John Singer Sargent's) are different than these.

Bouguereau's career portfolio is full of very sweet scenes: the Nut Gatherers and Innocence, for instance. In fact, his primary output was comprised of "far less dramatic pictures of beggar children, the Madonna, and cooly erotic mythological nudes." (Harrison, 46) The Orestes, from his career's academic phase, uses familiar figures, as one might anticipate from an academic painter — Greek tragic themes. The French Salon's rejection of Bouguereau's work in 1863 suggests that the era for that sentiment was closing. Contemporary critics disliked B.'s painting and the result: "Bouguereau had seldom before attempted so pure an expression of grand guignol ["melodrama", i.e. works of lurid intensity]... When his "Orestes" was condemned in the Salon, B. abandoned the genre for good." The artist's hopes for academic success dashed, B. reversed his course: "I soon found that the horrible, the frenzied, and the heroic does not pay; and as the public of today prefers Venuses and Cupids and I paint to please the public, it is to Venus and Cupid I chiefly devote myself." (B. cited by A. Werner, 'Great Boug-Bear of Academic Painting,' Antioch Review Dec. 1955, 490, cited in J.C. Harrison French Paintings from the Chrysler Museum (Norfolk, 1991), see above.)