Gypsy Girl with a Basque Drum 1867

William Bouguereau painted this oil on canvas, entitled Gypsy Girl with a Basque Drum, at some point during his career as a French academic painter. Here, we see a young woman with a tear running down her cheek, holding a tambourine. Bouguereau romanticizes the figure of the ‘gypsy’ as an exotic ‘other’, while also making her palatable to a bourgeois audience, whose patronage propped up the French art world. Bouguereau worked within the Salon system, exhibiting at the annual government-sponsored exhibition, and he was the president of the Société des Artistes Français, which controlled access to the Salon. His paintings are made in a highly polished, realist style, meant to imitate the look of Renaissance art. To further understand the meanings of Bouguereau’s image, scholars might look at the archives of the Salon, the records of the Société des Artistes Français, and the history of ‘gypsy’ figures in French art and culture. The meaning of art is always reliant on a deep understanding of its social and institutional context.