Footnotes

Provenance
With M. Knoedler & Co., New York, acquired directly from the artist, March 21, 1895.
Alexander McBurney Byers (1827-1900), Pittsburgh, acquired from the above, April 13, 1895.
John Frederick Byers (1881-1949), Pittsburgh, son of the above, by descent from the above, 1900.
Joseph Verner Reed, Jr. (1937-2016), New York.
Sale, Parke-Bernet, New York, April 7, 1966, lot 105. (as Les Soeurs).
With Norton Galleries, New York.
With Galleries Maurice Sternberg, Chicago.
Private collection, Chicago.
With Michelman Fine Art, New York, by April 1985. (as Les Deux Soeurs).
Private collection, acquired from the above, April 12, 1985.
By descent to the present owners from the above, 2023.

Literature
Braun & Clément, Oeuvres choisies des maîtres, no. 4634, illustrated.
Marius Vachon, W. Bouguereau, Paris, 1900, p. 159.
M. S. Walker, 'A Summary Catalogue of the Paintings', in Borghi & Co., William Bouguereau: l'art pompier, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1991, p. 74.
Damien Bartoli & Frederick C. Ross, William Bouguereau: His Life and Works, New York, 2010, p. 477, pl. 312, illustrated.
Damien Bartoli & Frederick C. Ross, William Bouguereau: Catalogue Raisonné of his Painted Work, New York, 2010, p. 299, no. 1895/08, illustrated.

In Fardeau Agréable all Bouguereau's formidable prowess is distilled onto the canvas in two engaging young sisters and the pastoral idyll in which they exist; the result is an image of beauty at its purest in the mind of the artist. This is art for art's sake with Bouguereau giving all his attention to the flawless depiction of the figures, spurning any sense of narrative. The composition is dominated by the two sisters in an idealised image of their humble existence. Pastoral subjects such as this, almost always a single peasant girl or two sisters, became the subject matter for some of Bouguereau's most revered and popular works.

While some French artists of the Realist movement such as Jean-François Millet and Léon Augustin Lhermitte sought to faithfully depict peasant life and its labours, Bouguereau romanticised it and here we see a serene, innocent scene unburdened by any trace of social or economic hardship. In striving to achieve a vision of idyllic rural youth he deliberately ignores the realities of political, industrial and urban life of 19th late century France. According to Alfred Nettement, a student at the Académie Julien, his teacher Bouguereau 'had an absolute horror of what we would call realism and he always said that reality is charming when it borrows a gleam of poetry from the imagination'¹.

The sisters are set before a landscape and sky which not only attest to Bouguereau's skill as a landscape painter but are redolent of late 19th century taste. The first half of the century saw the industrial revolution change pastoral landscapes in Europe and America for ever and as manufacturing increased and urban centres expanded, so did nostalgia for an unspoilt countryside and peasant life. In Fardeau Agréable, as in nearly all of Bouguereau's work, the industrial age is not evident, no buildings mar the landscape, and no smoke clouds the skies of the imagined Arcadia. Bouguereau raises his figures above the harsh truth of day-to-day existence in the French peasant countryside and exalts the joy and tenderness of youth and the beauty of nature.

The younger sister can be identified as Yvonne, one of Bouguereau's favourite models. Little biographical information is known about Yvonne and her two sisters, Jeanne and Marguerite, however they probably lived in La Rochelle as they came regularly to the Bouguereau household and were treated like family. They provided much inspiration for Bouguereau who was born in the area and spent his summers there in the 1890s to escape the social and professional pressures of Paris. The growth of Yvonne and her sisters is recorded in Bouguereau's work of the 1890s, from Yvonne's first appearance in Allant à la Fontaine in 1893 (J. B. Speed Museum, Louisville, Kentucky) at the age of perhaps five or six, we see her grow up as Bouguereau used her as a model until the end of his life.

Often Bouguereau's figures appear contemplative or distracted, far away in a daydream, however here he seems intent on portraying Yvonne's character as well as her likeness. She gazes engagingly out of the canvas with the confidence and innocence of youth fixing the viewer with an expression full of emotion and intelligence. The elder sister stands on the cusp of womanhood and the dashes of colour Bouguereau has added in the form of wildflowers in the lower left, not only add colour to the composition but come to symbolise the flowering of youth, connotations which would not have been lost on his audience. Bouguereau has been lauded for his mastery of rendering the human figure and nowhere is this more evident than in Fardeau Agréable. The sisters sit together in perfect balance and harmony, their movement natural as they pass through the landscape, briefly interrupted by the viewer.

Great care and consideration are given to every passage and every detail and the execution of the interlocked hands is a perfect example of this meticulous attention. To achieve such authenticity in his figures Bouguereau became a master of the academic style. While working on an oil such as this he would produce many preparatory drawings paying close attention to each individual detail, working and reworking the important parts of the composition ensuring he had full freedom and confidence when setting paint to canvas. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he also preferred to use life models instead of adapting to use photographs as can be seen in fig. 1 which shows Bourguereau in the summer of 1898 working on Les deux soeurs, 1899 and features Yvonne three years after her appearance in Fardeau Agréable.

The latter period of Bouguereau's career from which Fardeau Agréable dates followed the great successes of his classical, mythological and religious subjects of his earlier oeuvre and was ushered in by his association with the art dealer Durand-Ruel in the 1860s. To cater to the tastes of his patrons and particularly the international market, Bouguereau shifted his choice of subjects away from the historical and religious and towards the romanticised images of the pastoral, of the type we see here. This resulted in an appetite for Bouguereau's work in North America which neared insatiable in the later years of the 19th century fuelled by first by the French dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and then solidified by Durand-Ruel's foremost competitor, Adolphe Goupil. Between 1866 and 1887, Bouguereau would sell ten to twelve works per year to Goupil for an agreed upon sum, and Goupil then sold approximately nine out of every ten to dealers outside of France, mostly to Wallis in London and Knoedler in New York. In fact, only eight works painted during this period are recorded by Goupil as having been sold to collectors in France.

The taste of these American patrons would lay the foundation for the collection of many American museums and as art critic and author Clarence Cook noted in his second volume of Art and Artists of Our Time, "Hardly any French painter can be named who is more widely popular in America than Bouguereau. His pictures always meet with a ready sale at large prices, and at the exhibitions they are sure of approval from the majority of the visitors, who would probably pass by Delacroix, Decamps, or Puvis de Chavannes, with small notice, or none at all"². Fardeau Agréable formed part of this tradition when it was acquired by Pittsburgh based financier and iron magnate Alexander McBurney Byers, directly from Knoedler just twenty-four days after it entered the galleries' inventory.

¹A. Nettement, William Bouguereau, L'Académie Julien, January 1908, p. 3, as quoted in M. S. Walker, William Bouguereau, exh. cat., Montreal, 1984, p. 57.
²As quoted in Fronia E. Wissman, Bouguereau, San Francisco, 1996, p. 108-9.