In his realistic genre paintings, he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body.

[1] During his life, he enjoyed significant popularity in France and the United States, was given numerous official honors, and received top prices for his work.

[3] William-Adolphe Bouguereau was born in La Rochelle, France, on 30 November 1825, into a family of wine and olive oil merchants.

[5] At the age of twelve, Bouguereau went to Mortagne-sur-Gironde to stay with his uncle Eugène, a priest, and developed a love of nature, religion, and literature.

Academic painting placed the highest status on historical and mythological subjects and Bouguereau determined to win the Prix de Rome, which would gain him a three-year residence at the Villa Medici in Rome, Italy, where, in addition taking formal lessons, he could study firsthand the Renaissance artists and their masterpieces, as well as Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities.

His third attempt commenced unsuccessfully in April 1850 with Dante and Virgil but five months later, he heard he had won a joint first prize for Shepherds Find Zenobia on the Banks of the Araxes.

Although he had a strong admiration for all traditional art, he particularly revered Greek sculpture, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Rubens and Delacroix.

In 1856, the Ministry of State for Fine Arts commissioned him to paint Emperor Napoleon III Visiting the Victims of the Tarascon Flood.

[5] By the late 1850s, he had made strong connections with art dealers, particularly Paul Durand-Ruel (later the champion of the Impressionists), who helped clients buy paintings from artists who exhibited at the Salons.

[13] Three paintings were shown at the 1863 Salon and Holy Family (Now at Chimei Museum) was sold to Napoleon III, who presented it to his wife the Empress Eugénie, who hung it in her Tuileries apartment.

Once installed in the city in summer 1875 he began Pietà, one of his greatest religious paintings and shown at the 1876 Salon, in tribute to his son Georges.

[5] Bouguereau was a staunch traditionalist whose genre paintings and mythological themes were modern interpretations of Classical subjects, both pagan and Christian, with a concentration on the naked female form.

The idealized world of his paintings brought to life goddesses, nymphs, bathers, shepherdesses, and madonnas in a way that appealed to wealthy art patrons of the era.

[17] From the 1860s, Bouguereau was closely associated with the Académie Julian where he gave lessons and advice to art students, male and female, from around the world.

Many of them managed to establish artistic careers in their own countries, sometimes following his academic style, and in other cases, rebelling against it, like Henri Matisse.

[19] He began to teach drawing at the Académie Julian[20] in 1875, a co-ed art institution independent of the École des Beaux-Arts, with no entrance exams and nominal fees.

[22] The artist planned to marry Elizabeth Jane Gardner, a pupil whom he had known for ten years, but his mother was opposed to the idea.

In 1866, the year of his marriage to Nelly, he bought a vast plot of land on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and an architect was commissioned to design a grand house with a top-floor studio.

[3] Near the end of his life he described his love of his art: "Each day I go to my studio full of joy; in the evening when obliged to stop because of darkness I can scarcely wait for the next morning to come ... if I cannot give myself to my dear painting I am miserable.

[5] In his own time, Bouguereau was considered to be one of the greatest painters in the world by the academic art community, and simultaneously he was reviled by the avant-garde.

He also gained wide fame in Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Romania and in the United States, and commanded high prices.

Degas and his associates used the term "Bouguereauté" in a derogatory manner to describe any artistic style reliant on "slick and artificial surfaces",[24] also known as a licked finish.

[17] Paul Gauguin loathed him, rating him a round zero in Racontars de Rapin and later describing in Avant et après (Intimate Journals) the single occasion when Bouguereau made him smile on coming across a couple of his paintings in an Arles brothel, "where they belonged".

[28] Gold Rush tycoon James Ben Ali Haggin and his family, who normally eschewed the nude, made an exception for Bouguereau's Nymphaeum.

[29] However, even during his lifetime, there was critical dissent in assessing his work; the art historian Richard Muther wrote in 1894 that Bouguereau was a man "destitute of artistic feeling but possessing a cultured taste [who] reveals... in his feeble mawkishness, the fatal decline of the old schools of convention".

In 1926, American art historian Frank Jewett Mather criticized the commercial intent of Bouguereau's work, writing that the artist "multiplied vague, pink effigies of nymphs, occasionally draped them, when they became saints and madonnas, painted on the great scale that dominates an exhibition, and has had his reward.

[8] Comparing his work to that of his Realist and Impressionist contemporaries, Kenneth Clark faulted Bouguereau's painting for "lubricity", and characterized such Salon art as superficial, employing the "convention of smoothed-out form and waxen surface".

More recently, resurgence in the artist's popularity has been promoted by American collector Fred Ross, who owns a number of paintings by Bouguereau and features him on his website at Art Renewal Center.

Notre Dame des Anges ("Our Lady of the Angels") was last shown publicly in the United States at the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893.

Kelly was subsequently found guilty by a jury in Albany, New York, of defaming the dealer in remarks made in a television interview.