The Virgin With Angels

The Virgin with Angels (La Vierge aux anges), also called Regina Angelorum or Queen of the Angels, is an oil-on-canvas painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, signed and dated 1900; it is in the Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

Bouguereau's career was shaped by the official art world from start to finish: he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1846 to 1850, won the Prix de Rome in 1850 and was elected to the Institut in 1876. He kept to the academic manner long after Impressionism had established itself, and this late religious work was shown at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris, in the retrospective exhibition of French art of 1889 to 1900.

Conceived as a monumental altarpiece, the picture returns to the type of the Virgin in Majesty painted in the thirteenth century by Cimabue and Duccio. Mary stands before a throne inlaid with coloured stones, which the Petit Palais links to Bouguereau's admiration for the sixth-century mosaics of Ravenna. She wears a crown of twelve stars, nine of them visible, and holds the Christ Child, who raises his arms in a gesture of blessing and looks out at the viewer. A ring of angels with almost identical feminine faces turns towards them, hands joined or laid on the breast, and the two kneeling in front swing censers. Whites and golds dominate; only Mary's black and purple garments stand out against the pale tones. The graceful heavenly figures show the influence of the Italian Renaissance, although the treatment is more sentimental than in its models, and the painting's reputation has declined since 1900.

The canvas measures 280 × 184 cm, and nearly 4 metres high in its frame. In 1983 Charles Vincens-Bouguereau gave it to the Petit Palais, where it hangs on the garden level.