Work Interrupted

Work Interrupted (Le Travail interrompu) is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, dated 1891; it is in the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Massachusetts.

By 1891 Bouguereau had received many official honours: a former Prix de Rome winner, a life member of the Académie since 1876 and a teacher at the Académie Julian, he exhibited at the Paris Salon throughout his career. Much of his later work turned classical subjects into modern genre scenes, peopled with goddesses, nymphs, bathers and shepherdesses, which appealed to wealthy patrons of the day.

The painting imagines a moment of daily life in ancient Greece. A young woman in loose white drapery sits barefoot on a dark curved chair on a tiled terrace, a ball of blue wool in her hand; beside her stands a wicker basket of more wool and, across the scene, a small loom threaded with the same yarn. A winged Cupid perched on the terrace wall leans over her shoulder and, as the museum's label puts it, anoints her ear with perfume, so that her thoughts drift from the tedious work of winding wool towards love. She turns her eyes towards him, half smiling.

The stretched canvas measures 160 × 99.7 cm. The Mead Art Museum's label notes that Bouguereau's strictly realistic, classical manner won him wide acclaim in France and the United States at the very time the Impressionists were struggling to establish a different approach, and points to the luminous colour and almost invisible brushwork as characteristic of his work. The museum bought the painting in 1971.