Pietà
The original
This work is privately held. No museum publishes an artist line, a date, a medium or an accession number for it, so none is given here.
The file this print is made from
Sizes
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View in the galleryAbout this painting
Mary's black cloak swallows her head — mourning, not serene devotion. Her eyes are red-rimmed, filled with sorrow and accusation, not acceptance. Around her, angels robed in every color of the rainbow recall the sign God showed Noah: hope circling a dead son. She does not offer Christ's body outward — she clutches it.
A crown of thorns lies at his feet on a blood-stained cloth. Bouguereau painted the scene in 1876, the year after his own son Georges died at sixteen; a stone urn in it reads IN MEMORIAM DILECTI MEI FILII GEORGII...
Sources: Kara Lysandra Ross, 'William Bouguereau and his Religious Works,' Art Renewal Center · Genesis 9:13, Douay-Rheims (primary text, cited by locator) · Damien Bartoli with Fred Ross, 'Biography of William Bouguereau', Art Renewal Center · Art Renewal Center catalogue record (Bouguereau catalogue raisonné, Bartoli/Ross), 'Pieta' · Warburg Institute Iconographic Database, School of Advanced Study, University of London — record for Bouguereau, 1876 (inscribed on the vase)
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 3,059 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.