Song of the Angels
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
Sizes
About this painting
The only correction in the picture is a tuning. Getty X-rays revealed almost no changes: a few pegs shifted on the violin played by the centre angel, nothing else. Bouguereau painted the whole thing again at half size, matching himself down to the number of brushstrokes.
Kara Lysandra Ross reads the three musicians as the Trinity foreshadowed, and the sleep as peace "unaware of the suffering that is destined to follow". A lullaby is made to disturb nothing, and neither did the hand.
Bouguereau had buried his son Georges in 1875 and, in 1877, his wife and their seven-month-old.
Sources: J. Paul Getty Museum, conservation partnership: Bouguereau's Virgin of the Angels; treatment by Mark Leonard · J. Paul Getty Museum, 'Adolphe-William Bouguereau: An Introduction', through 15 June 2006 · Forest Lawn Museum, 'The Song of Angels' · Forest Lawn Museum, Collection Highlights · Kara Lysandra Ross, 'William Bouguereau and his Religious Works', Art Renewal Center · Damien Bartoli with Fred Ross, 'Biography of William Bouguereau', Art Renewal Center
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 5,126 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.