在当时的年代，他的画非常受欢迎，特别受到英美两国民众的青睐，可谓风头一时无两。大众对于他那种对唯美的诠释感到不可思议且喜爱万分，可说是继安格尔以后的另一个把古典美发挥得淋漓尽致的巨匠，甚至认为他可以媲美意大利文艺复兴三杰之一的拉斐尔(Raphael)，同样以温柔婉约的画风取胜，擅刻画典雅气质的女性形象。
阿道夫·威廉·布格罗( 1825 – 1905) ,於1825年11月30日出生在La Rochelle(在法国西部沿海)的一个酒庄。 他21岁时前往巴黎进入Francois-Edouard Picot工作室，并开始参加the Prix de Rome(一个美术奖项)的竞选，在1850年获奖，补助他到罗马的Villa Medici(法兰西学院的意大利所在地)进修四年，他把握机会研究文艺复兴时代的大师名作，同时也广泛旅游了意大利的农村，这段时期的经历奠基了他日后的风格与主题。回到巴黎后，他常在沙龙展出，作品广受公众与批评家欢迎，也被代理销受到美国与英国，并且获得许多奖项，在1859年受封，1876年获得Legion of Honour(荣誉爵位)，一度成为Academie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France的四十名成员之一，这是法国艺术家的最高荣誉；此后又成为比利时与西班牙的荣誉爵士、荷兰皇家美术学院的院士。 他是是法国19世纪上半叶法国学院派绘画的最重要人物。
1883年他成为沙龙领导人，致力於提升新进美术家的福利，并在学院中教课。最终在1905年8月19日去世。之所以会选择Bouguereau的作品是因为以天使与神画为主题的画作，另外还有女祭司那一幅。 如果把神话故事纳入奇幻的选题，奇幻的疆界将可以延伸至更深隧的时代，也更能表现出一脉相承的悠远历史；或许也可以观察西洋艺术发展对於奇幻画作的影响。
Biography of William Bouguereau
William Bouguereau is unquestionably one of history's greatest artistic geniuses. Yet in the past century, his reputation andunparalleled accomplishments have undergone a libelous, dishonest, relentless and systematic assault of immense proportions. His name was stricken from most history texts and when included it was only to blindly, degrade and disparage him and his work. Yet, as we shall see, it was he who single handedly opened the French academies to women, and it was he who was arguably the greatest painter of the human figure in all of art history. His figures come to life like no previous artist has ever before or ever since achieved. He wasn’t
just the best ever at painting human anatomy, more importantly he captured the tender and subtlest nuances of personality and mood.
Bouguereau caught the very souls and spirits of his subjects much like Rembrandt. Rembrandt is said to have captured the soul of age. Bouguereau captured the soul of youth.
Considering his consummate level of skill and craft, and the fact that the great preponderance of his works are life-size, it is one of the largest bodies of work ever produced by any artist. Add to that the fact that fully half of these paintings are great masterpieces, and we have the picture of an artist who belongs like Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Carravaggio, in the top ranks of only a handful of masters in the entire history of western art.
Having died in 1905, we can suppose it best that he was not here to see the successful assault on traditional art that turned the art world inside out and upside down in the decades that followed his death. His fate was to be much like that of Rembrandt, whose work was also ridiculed and banished from museums and official art circles for the hundred years following his death. Rembrandt’s reputation wasn’t resuscitated until the 1790’s (he died in 1669) due to the influence of the founder of the Royal Academy in London, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Even as recently as 1910, Reynolds paintings brought higher prices at auction than Rembrandt. Bouguereau’s re-appreciation can rather accurately be traced from about 1979 when his prices at auction quadrupled that year alone, and then was further catapulted by the 1984 retrospective that traveled from the Petite Palais in Paris, to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Canada and finally to the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford. In 1980 The Metropolitan Museum in New York permanently hung two of his works that been left in storage from early in the century.
