Pietà

Pietà is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, signed and dated 1876 and painted in memory of his eldest son Georges; shown at the Paris Salon of 1876, it is in a private collection.

Georges Bouguereau died in 1875 at the age of sixteen; the Latin dedication painted on the vase at lower right reads, in translation, 'In memory of my beloved son Georges, 19 July 1875'. According to the Christie's catalogue, Bouguereau spent months overwhelmed by grief before throwing himself back into work. His sketchbooks of the period are filled with drawings working out the composition, and a press report of March 1876 suggests he completed the large canvas in only about two months, in time for that year's Salon, where critics praised its sincere feeling.

The Virgin, wrapped in black and crowned with a gold halo, holds the dead Christ across her lap and looks straight out at the viewer, less a heavenly queen than a mother who has lost her son. Around them crowd angels in robes of different colours, each grieving in an individual way. Christie's notes the debt to Michelangelo's Pietà in St Peter's, Rome, in the placing of Christ's torso and arms and the head fallen back; Bouguereau had lived in Rome as a Prix de Rome winner, and a photograph shows a reproduction of the sculpture on his studio wall. In the foreground lie a gold basin and vase, the crown of thorns and a cloth; the art historian Robert Rosenblum remarked that one could prick oneself on the thorns.

The canvas measures 222.9 × 149.2 cm. Bouguereau sold it on 29 July 1876 to Prince Demidoff for 30,000 francs. It later passed through the Sedelmeyer sale in 1877, Goupil & Cie, a Spanish private collection, and dealers and collectors in Paris and the United States, among them the actor Sylvester Stallone. At Christie's New York on 9 June 2010 it sold for $2,770,500, then the second-highest auction price for the artist.