Milwaukee

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) is the artist everyone loves to hate. His meticulously rendered—nary a brushstroke in sight—and idealized images of comely country lasses, doe-eyed street urchins and pulchritudinous nymphs defined French 19th-century academic art. Both Bouguereau’s subjects and his treatment of them, cloyingly sentimental or coyly erotic, ensured that his name became a byword for everything the Impressionists, with their loosely executed paintings of everyday life, reacted against. Nor...