Italien à la mandoline

A consummate example of Bouguereau's ability to render tender portraits of children, Italien à la mandoline depicts a young peasant boy holding his elegant instrument. Although images of boys are rare in Bouguereau's oeuvre, perhaps, as Damien Bartoli suggests, because of the artist's difficult relationship with his own father, this youth appears in three other works which date to this same period -- Pifferaro (1870, fig. 1), Pifferaro (1874) and Enfant Italien tenant une croûte de pain (1874). With his flushed plump pink cheeks and sparkling eyes, this lad appears as the very embodiment of youth. As he stares languidly off into the distance, there is a sweet innocence about him that reminds one of the halcyon days of childhood.

By the time Bouguereau painted Italien à la mandoline, he had already gained considerable recognition in Paris where he regularly exhibited at the Salon. But Bouguereau was born in the countryside and his heart remained there, leading him to spend long stretches outside of Paris painting the monde paysan; the subject for which he is most remembered today. Italien à la mandoline thus represents Bouguereau doing what he loved most, painting the French peasantry, whom he perceived as embodying beauty, purity and hope, the central principles of his artistic philosophy.

(fig. 1) William Adolphe Bouguereau, Pifferaro, 1870, Christie's, New York, 23 April 2012, lot 34.